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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



BOOKS 

BY 

FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD LL.D. 

Recently Published. 

QUABBIN. The Story of a Small Town 

With Outlooks upon Puritan Life 
Twelve Illustrations and Portrait Cloth $1.75 

In Press 
A NORTHERN CONSTELLATION 
Being Biographies of American Poets 
comprising 

LOWELL (now ready) EMERSON 

LONGFELLOW 
WHITTIER HOLMES 

THE BUILDERS OF AMERICAN 
LITERATURE. Biographical and 
Critical Sketches of Leading Ameri- 
can Writers 

First Series Contains such as were born pre- 
vious to 1825 

Second Series Contains those born since 



LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 
BOSTON 



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^ ^Zovtlfczxu (CnustzlXntxim 

* 

LOWELL 




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Mr. Lowell at Three Score and Ten, 



THE POET AND THE MAN 



RECOLLECTIONS AND APPRECIATIONS 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD LL.D. 

FORMERLY U. S. CONSUL AT GLASGOW 
AUTHOR OF " QUABBIN " " HANDBOOKS OF ENGLISH LITERA- 
TURE " " THE BUILDERS OF AMERICAN 
LITERATURE " ETC. 



^efwAsms^ 



BOSTON 
LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 

IO MILK STREET 

1893 




Copyright, 1893, by Lee and Shepard 



All Rights Reserved 



The Poet and the Man 



/-?- $ft>fi 



TO 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

It seems not only appropriate but almost oblig- 
atory to dedicate these Recollections to you, — 
Lowell's life-long friend, associated with all 
memories of old Cambridge, and the last of an 
historic group of authors whose fame is the 
pride of New England. 



PREFATORY 



This Memoir is wholly distinct from the 
author's Biographical Sketch, which was 
published about a dozen years ago, while 
Lowell was Minister to Spain. 

The author's intention is to furnish in 
compact form the important facts in the 
poet's life, with a brief account of his / 
works, and to record some personal im- 
pressions and reminiscences. For sev- 
eral years the author lived in Cambridge, 
and was one of a circle of half a dozen of / 
Lowell's friends which met frequently at 
Elmwood and elsewhere. His opportuni- 
ties for knowing the poet in his brightest 
days were exceptional. As most of the 
members of that circle are dead, it seems 
to be something like a duty for the author 
to recall and fix his impressions before 
they become dim. No faithful study, made 
at first hand, of the character and personal 
traits of such a remarkable and richly en- 



IV PREFATORY 

dowed man, can be without interest and 
value. 

Within the limits of a small volume like 
this, there can be few details or discussions : 
for any fulness of statement and for an 
adequate analysis of Lowell's works, the 
reader must wait until a biography on a 
larger scale shall appear. This Memoir, 
however, will supply timely information 
v . for readers who cannot dwell long upon 
the life and works of any one man. 

The author gained his knowledge of Low- 
ell from long personal intercourse, supple- 
mented by information from the late Dr. 
Estes Howe, who married a sister of the 
poet's first wife, and from the late Robert 
Carter, Lowell's intimate friend, and co- 
editor of the brilliant and ill-fated Pioneer. 
Excepting the Biographical Sketch, before 
referred to, it is believed that no original 
account of Lowell has been published. 
That Sketch must have been the source — 
generally unacknowledged — from which 
most newspaper articles were drawn. 

In September, 189 1, while in Scotland, 

the author was asked to write an article 

/ upon Lowell for the Contemporary Review. 



PREFATORY V 

He wrote out of a full mind and memory, 
without the opportunity to consult books 
or old friends ; and the article appeared a 
month later. That article, with additions 
and changes, forms the basis of the present 
Memoir. He did not make use of the 
Sketch, for in the course of years the point 
of view had changed. 

It is announced that selections from 
Lowell's letters are about to appear, edited 

^ by his near friend and literary executor, 
Professor Charles Eliot Norton. The let- 
ters are sure to be full of interest; for 
Lowell showed consummate skill and tact 

^ in his correspondence, as in familiar talk 
with friends ; and it would not be surpris- 
ing if these volumes should become the 
most attractive part of his works. 

Acknowledgments are due to Messrs. 
Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., for permission 
to copy the two poems, "The Foot Path," 
and "Beaver Brook." 



CONTENTS 



Page 



I. A Poet's Place in the World. A Poet's 
Flowering. Lowell's Ancestors. His Father 
and Mother. Elmwood as a Home. Reading 

and Education 7~ 1 7 

II. New England Awakening. Cambridge 
as it was. Lowell studies Law. Renounces 
" the World." Love the Motive. First vol- 
ume of verse. Edits a Magazine. Is Married. 
Second volume of verse. Unpopularity. Por- 
traits of Two Idealists. A Lover of Nature . 18-30 

III. The Coming of Hosea^ and what He 
did. Wit and Humor contrasted. " A Yankee 
Idyl." " The Vision of Sir Launfal." "A Fable 
for Critics." Two more volumes of verse. 
Death of Mrs. Lowell. "The Two Angels," 31-39 

IV. Sunday Afternoons at Elmwood. The 
Whist Club. Lowell's Joyous Nature. Fas- 
tidious Habits. Lowell Institute Lectures on 
British Poets. Succeeds Longfellow as Pro- 
fessor. His Theories of Finance and Book- 
keeping. Cider Bottles. Periods of Industry 40-47 

V. Origin of the Atlantic Monthly. Suc- 
cess assured by the "Autocrat." Atlantic 
Dinners. Sketch of Leading Contributors. 

3 



4 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Holmes and Emerson on Architecture. Din- 
ner for Lady Contributors. Boston and Edin- 
burgh. A Provincial Note. What were the 
Rates of Payment . . 48-58 

VI. Lowell's Second Wife and Her Influ- 
ence. Dr. Estes Howe. Anti-Slavery Poli- 
tics. Hosea Biglow and the Civil War. Sec- 
ond Series of " Biglow Papers." The Master- 
piece. Lowell's Heroic Nephews. Edits N. A. 
Review. Reads his " Commemoration Ode " 59-68 

VII. " Under the Willows." < 'Gold Egg." 
Nicotia. Bartlett's Trout. Where " The Foot 
Path" leads. Prophetic Poems. Inclines to 
Spiritual Themes and to Landscapes. Scen- 
ery the Background, not the Subject of High- 
est Poetry. ' * The Cathedral. ' ' Two volumes of 
Essays. Not disturbed by Critics. Tribute to 
Agassiz. Three Noble Odes 69-82 

VIII. Lowell's Upward Course. Minister 
to Spain and then to Great Britain. His Re- 
ception. His Loyalty to American Ideas. 
Welcomes Mr. Phelps, his Successor. " Hearts- 
ease and Rue." Returns to Elmwood. Is at- 
tacked by Disease. Death a Relief. His 
Funeral 82-88 

IX. Patriotic Poetry. American Poetry not 
always understood Abroad. Qualities in Low- 
ell's Poetry. Grace and Originality at Vari- 
ance. Moral and Ideal Traits. His Masters. 
A Philistine upon " Beaver Brook." Beauty 
of Thought preferred to Melody. A Philoso- 
pher as well as Poet 89-99 



CONTENTS 5 

PAGE 

X. The Noses of Great Poets. Opinions 
of a Physiognomist. Solidity of Understand- 
ing and Reason. Elements of his Prose. 
Fireside Travels. On a Certain Condescen- 
sion in Foreigners. Historical Essays. His * 
Power shown by Choice of Subjects. Ana- 
lytical and Constructive Criticism. Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, and Milton. Professor Masson, 
Lessing, Wordsworth. Ornaments and Allu- 
sions. Duality of Lowell's Mind. What is 

Ideal English? 100-112 

XI. A Modern Cato. Severe Satire. Low- 
ell's Religious Opinions. Radical (perhaps) 
in Theory, Conservative by Instinct. Esti- 
mate of Calvinism by Results. Agrees with 
Rev. Dr. Savage. Favorite Authors. A 
Story of Thackeray. Complaint of Lowell's 
Manners. Courageous Speech in London. 
Presentation of Americans at Court. Would 
not Write for Money. Left a Small Estate. 

The Lessons of His Career 113-128 

Bibliography 129-133 



THE POET AND THE MAN 



I. 



The coming of a poet is an event, and 
sometimes marks an epoch. A poet of origi- 
nal force does much to mould the thought 
of his age, and to influence taste, sentiment, 
and mental habitude. In ancient days his 
songs kept alive the spirit of the clan while 
marching to battle ; and in the intervals of 
peace his ballads of love and war were the 
delight of gentle and simple. The minstrel 
has gone, along with knights, palmers, and 
jesters, but in his place has come the printed 
page, so that whoever will may take hold of 
all that poets think and feel. 

Poetry now envelops mankind as with an 
atmosphere ; and who can estimate its in- 
fluence ? Who can number the households 
that have been cheered, sustained, and con- 
soled by the verse of Longfellow and of 
Bryant ? — the patriotic souls that have been 
7 



8 THE POET AND THE MAN 

stirred by the " Union and Liberty " of 
Holmes? — the youth whose aspirations 
have been awakened by the appeals of 
Whittier and Lowell ? 

A poet who is also a singer of the divine 
love and good-will is the modern prophet ; 
he is the living voice of primitive Christi- 
anity. It is a noble gift to conceive forms 
and ideas of beauty, but far more glorious 
when piety, justice, and brotherhood are 
themes of song; such poems may be 
called, without irreverence, exemplars of 
" the beauty of holiness." 

Apart from his poetic genius, Lowell was 
a grand man, and has left an example of 
integrity, courage, and patriotism which 
should endure. In the leading classes of 
this country to-day the chief want is hon- 
esty ; the chief vice, selfish greed. The 
sense of honor which scorns unfair advan- 
tages in business, and trickery in politics, 
seems to have almost disappeared. Money 
and power are to be won, even if the whole 
decalogue stands in the way. But a govern- 
ment of the people has no stable foundation 
except in righteousness. Movements are 
already felt, and when the lowest strata 
heave, the highest must topple. The ur- 
gent and immediate lesson for American 



A poet's flowering 9 

youth is that liberty never long survives 
when truth and justice are dethroned. 

If poets were produced as perfected 
flowers are, their growth would be a fas- 
cinating study. And there are analogies. 
Flowers have their times of expansion in 
the life-giving sun, and of self-closure and 
revery in the coolness of evening: they 
reach upward to breathe all favoring influ- 
ences, still holding fast by their roots to 
mother earth; and when their calyces, 
"each after his kind," unclose in varying 
forms and colors, the glory of their being 
is attained. In thinking of the blossoms 
of the ideal world it is natural, by com- 
parison, to "consider the lilies, 7 ' and to 
wish that all the unfoldings of thought and 
feeling were as simple and spontaneous as 
theirs. 

The student of poetry has a task unlike 
the horticulturist's, for the latter knows 
well the objects of his care: he antici- 
pates their foliation and flowering; while 
the budding poet often proves to be a 
specimen of a new variety, not in the 
books, and not to be classified by pedants. 

Race, ancestry, education, and environ- 
ment are all to be considered in the de- 



IO THE POET AND THE MAN 

velopment of a poet; and to know what 
Lowell was it is necessary to consider the 
leading facts of his life. 

Few families in Massachusetts have 
shown the persistent virility and the con- 
tinually repeated high traits of character 
which have marked the Lowells. They 
are descended from Percival Lowell 
(Lowle, it was anciently spelled), a mer- 
chant of Bristol, England, who settled in 
Newbury in 1639. Two or more of the 
family were clergymen ; and there is still 
in the poet's house, Elmwood, Cambridge, 
— the house in which he was born and in 
which he died, — a panel taken from the an- 
cestral home in Newbury, on which is rep- 
resented a number of clergymen, seated 
at a table with long clay pipes, but no 
decanters, engaged in friendly discussion. 
On the pictured wall is seen this motto: 
In necessariis unitas ; in non necessariis liber- 
tas ; in omnibus caritas. The panel is a 
rude specimen of art, but rich in suggestion. 

In each generation the family has fur- 
nished distinguished men and public ben- 
efactors. John Lowell, the poet's grand- 
father, an eminent legislator and judge, 
drafted the clause in the Constitution of 
Massachusetts (1820) which put an end 



HIS ANCESTORS II 

to slavery in the State. The poet was 
prouder of this honor than he would have 
been of a patent of nobility. Another of 
the family was the chief promoter of cotton 
manufacture in the city which bears his 
name. Another founded the Lowell Insti- 
tute which furnishes free lectures in Boston. 
The poet's father, Rev. Charles Lowell, 
D. D., was for more than half a century 
minister of the West Church in Boston: 
but he lived in Cambridge, four miles 
distant, in a house built by the last repre- 
sentative of British authority in the Prov- 
ince; namely, Peter Oliver, stamp distrib- 
uter, who, having been waited upon " by a 
committee of about four thousand, " had re- 
signed his function and left the country. 
Dr. Lowell was universally respected and 
beloved. Like his ancestors and collateral 
relatives, he was a man of solid and prac- 
tical ability, and had little in common with 
some of his imaginative and versatile 
children. His father, Judge John Lowell, 
when a youth of seventeen furnished a 
part of the Pietas et Gratulatio, a wonderful 
round-robin, partly in Latin, sent by Har- 
vard College in 1761 to King George III. 
The evidence of the heavy heroics would 
not l^g sufficient to convict him of being 



12 THE POET AND THE MAN 

a poet; and it is probable that James and 
Robert, his grandsons, were the first of the 
family to write spontaneous verse. 

Dr. Lowell's wife was Harriet Traill 
Spence, born in Portsmouth, N. H., the 
daughter of an officer in the United States 
Navy, who was descended from an Orkney 
family, and possibly from Sir Patrick 
Spens. The poet often fondly referred to 
the well-known ballad, and was fain to 
think that its hero might have been one of 
his far-away ancestors. It was from his 
mother, who was certainly of Scottish, and 
probably of Celtic, blood, that he inherited 
his passionate love of poetry, and espe- 
cially of the old ballads. 

Dr. Lowell died in 1861. For many 
years previous he had been a widower and 
lived with his son James. Though nomi- 
nally minister, he rarely preached, but 
made occasional parochial visits, and gave 
his leisure to reading. Memory brings to 
mind a slender and (rather grimly) hand- 
some man; the ellipse of his lean face and 
high forehead fringed with gray hair; his 
eyes steady and not unkind; his voice deep 
and metallic ; his manner grave. Intelli- 
gence, veracity, and firmness shone in that 
striking countenance, but no sparkle of 



HIS FATHER AND MOTHER 1 3 

the humor or the lively genius of his famous 
son. The highest and noblest traits of 
our race — probity, justice, and honor — 
were his; and so sensitive was he that 
when his eldest son, who was engaged in 
business, became involved in debt, he vol- 
untarily parted with a sum of money that 
would have made most fathers pause. 
This son was the father of two youths who 
died in the War of the Rebellion; youths 
whose fate was the subject of the most pa- 
thetic and inspired passage in Lowell's 
poems. 1 

Dr. Lowell's second son, Robert Traill 
Spence Lowell, was an author and poet of 
mark, a clergyman in the Episcopal Church, 
and latterly a professor in Union College, 
Schenectady, N. Y. , where he died in 189 1, 
not long after his younger brother. The 
subject of this memoir used to relate with 
glee, and doubtless with picturesque exag- 
eration, the story of an encounter which 
took place when the new priest first came 
home on a visit after the (so-called) apos- 
tasy. The father had ransacked his an- 
tique theological armory, and with the un- 
conscious gravity of Don Quixote shivered 
lances for Congregationalism and against 

1 " Biglow Papers/' Second Series, Letter x., Stanzas 15, 16, 17. 



14 THE POET AND THE MAN 

the Apostolic Succession, and gesticulated 
over the great parchment-covered quartos 
with which the floor was strewed. Still, the 
good doctor, when in his pulpit, preached 
only practical Christianity, and never doc- 
trinal sermons. This story gives a hint of 
a possible likeness between the old Chris- 
tian knight and the Rev. Homer Wilbur. 

The doctor's eldest daughter, JMrs. Put- 
nam, who is (1893) still living, is an able 
woman, a writer of historical and political 
essays. Her only son, Captain William 
Lowell Putnam, just from college, beau- 
tiful as a young Apollo, and full of prom- 
ise, was killed at Ball's Bluff early in the 
war. The three slain nephews of the poet 
were the only males of the generation fol- 
lowing him. 1 

An unmarried sister, Rebecca, very re- 
tiring in her ways, died before the poet 
became widely known. It will be seen 
that there were three sons and two daugh- 
ters. Of the five children the poet was 
the youngest, and was born on Washing- 
ton's Birthday, Feb. 22, 18 19. 

If poetic genius is smothered by luxury, 
it is as surely pinched and starved by pov- 

1 See the touching dedication, prefixed to the "Commem- 
oration Ode," 



ELMWOOD 1 5 

erty. The family was in comfortable cir- 
cumstances; the father was prudent and 
saving, and the children, though brought 
up in old-fashioned simplicity, never knew 
want. The house counted for much in the 
family happiness. It is sombre and with- 
out architectural beauty, but spacious and 
comfortable. It is set in an ample grassy 
field. near Mount Auburn, just away from 
the travelled road, and is surrounded by 
tall, thick sheltering trees and flowering 
shrubs. It is a fit retreat for a dreamer or 
philosopher, since no sound breaks the 
stillness except that of the wind in the pine 
boughs, and the songs of the many birds 
that lodge in the thick coverts. The place 
which this garden held in the poet's mind 
is shown in many poems and essays. 

The library contained between three and 
four thousand volumes, including an excel- 
lent collection of English and French clas- 
sics in best editions, also travels, plays, 
stories, and biographies, the pick of some 
centuries, known and loved by the frater- 
nity of lettered men. In this rare library 
Dr. Lowell's children had free range, and 
to it the poet in later years made many 
additions, including German, Italian, and 
Spanish masterpieces. This was his real 



1 6 THE POET AND THE MAN 

education. He attended a good private 
school, and entered Harvard College in his 
sixteenth year; but he was a lagging stu- 
dent, indifferent to reproof, and at last 
was rusticated. The place of his rustica- 
tion was Concord, and he refers to it in 
the " Biglow Papers " : ' 

" I know the village, though: was sent there once 
A-schoolin', cause to home I played the dunce." 

He was still in banishment when the course 
was ending; and it is said he saw the out- 
door festivities of his class through a rift 
in the cover of a wagon in which he had 
surreptitiously returned. He had written 
verse while in college, and had been chosen 
class-poet, but, as the authorities refused 
to remit his sentence, the poem was printed 
and was not read by its author. 

Lowell often spoke of this, but without 
bitterness ; he felt that the action of the 
faculty was just. He said to the writer 
that while in college he was in the habit 
of reading all the books he came across, 
excepting those prescribed for his course of 
study, and that he was sure he would never 
have been allowed to take his degree if he 
had not been his father's son. He la- 

1 Mason and Slidell, Second Series. 



READING AND EDUCATION I J 

merited this early perverseness, because 
there remained so much more to do before 
he could become a scholar. Still his bril- 
liant qualities were manifest from the first, 
and students and professors alike predicted 
for him a distinguished career. 

Meantime, in his father's library he came 
to know every rood in the long highway 
of English literature, besides making some 
excursions in foreign territory. He had 
the prescience of genius, and assimilated 
all his eager eyes fell upon and his in- 
stinctive judgment approved. He read all 
manner of out-of-the-way things; and it 
was seldom in his maturer years that a 
book was named of which he did not know 
something. 



1 8 THE POET AND THE MAN 



II. 



Lowell came into the world in a fortu- 
nate time ; the reaction against Puritan rule, 
with its narrowness and illiberality, was 
well under way. Thought was free. The 
treasures of the classics were opened. Not 
only the fathers of Greek and Latin poetry, 
but Dante and Shakespeare, had been re- 
discovered. Scholarship was getting ex- 
tricated from pedantry. New ideas in 
poetry and philosophy were brought from 
Germany by returning students. Science 
was preparing for its great and beneficent 
career. With the new era the college and 
the region were becoming a recognized 
part of the realm of letters and art. This 
was the beginning of the fruitful period of 
American literature, as well as of humani- 
tarian philosophy and of boundless social 
improvement. 1 In that time began to ap- 
pear the poems of Bryant, Longfellow, 
Holmes, and Whittier, the essays of Chan- 

1 See " The Awakening of New England," in Contemporary 
Review for August, 1888. 



NEW ENGLAND AWAKENING 1 9 

ning and Emerson, and the histories of 
Bancroft and Prescott. 

It was fortunate also for Lowell that 
what was quaint, picturesque, and charac- 
teristic in the old life had not wholly dis- 
appeared. Perhaps it is partly due to the 
haze of distance, but there is something 
idyllic, — some tinge of romance, — as one 
looks back upon the rural Yankee of sixty 
years ago, when men's faces and speech 
had not become as like as pebbles. We 
know that the old life did not seem in the 
least picturesque to those who lived it. 
All martyrdoms, it has been said, looked 
mean when they were suffered, and the 
poetic side of struggles and endurance is 
dimly perceived until events have become 
history. In Lowell's youth the provincial 
period seemed near. In his essay, " Cam- 
bridge Thirty Years Ago," published in 
1853, he tells us that "old women, capped 
and spectacled, still peered through the 
same windows from which they had watched 
Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lex- 
ington, or caught a glimpse of the hand- 
some Virginian general who had come to 
wield our Saxon chivalry." Plenty of peo- 
ple in Cambridge spoke the old, rustic, 
chimney-corner English now becoming ex- 



20 THE POET AND THE MAN 

tinct. The home-life, the dress and man- 
ners of the elders had not changed greatly 
from the time of Bunyan. The accompani- 
ments of the College Commencement and 
of the militia trainings were for the popu- 
lace what Bartlemy Fair was for Londoners. 
Those festivals kept alive the traditions of 
the old times, as well as the bucolic speech, 
with its billowy inflections and its nasal 
tone. In the part of Cambridge near 
Boston called "the Port," observers like 
Holmes and Lowell could take an account 
of the commerce of the period, — a com- 
merce not in goods and wares only, but in 
jokes, stories, pranks, and rustic repartee. 
In the essay already cited Lowell says, 
" Great white-topped wagons, each drawn 
by double files of six or eight horses, with 
its dusty bucket swinging from the hinder 
axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting silent 
underneath, . . . brought all the wares 
and products of the country to their mart 
and seaport in Boston. These filled the 
inn-yards, or were ranged side by side 
under broad-roofed sheds; and far into 
the night the mirth of their lusty drivers 
clamored from the red-curtained bar-room, 
while the single lantern, swaying to and 
fro in the black cavern of the stables, made 



CAMBRIDGE AS IT WAS 21 

a Rembrandt of the group of hostlers and 
horses below." 

Teaming continued to be carried on by 
those great wagons until within the mem- 
ory of the writer. 

From such reminiscences we see the 
source of our poet's knowledge of Yankee 
life and character, and his familiarity with 
the dialect. A man born since 1850 could 
not have written a page of the "Biglow 
Papers," nor told the inimitable " Fitz 
Adam's Story." That old time has gone 
by. It would be difficult to find, except 
in remote and unfrequented settlements, 
any survival of the customs and speech 
which Lowell has so vividly depicted; so 
that the dialect of the " Biglow Papers " has 
become almost obsolete to the younger 
generation of readers. 

Carlyle observes that every day is at the 
convergence of two eternities, past and to 
come ; but it is important for the poet that 
the convergence for him occurs upon an 
epoch of change. Behind the youthful 
Lowell was the vanishing age of the rustic 
Yankee, with its audacious and far-glan- 
cing wit and its delicious quaintness of 
phrase ; while before him was an idealiza- 
tion of memory and the beginning of a new 



22 THE POET AND THE MAN 

era of song. Happily for the world, the 
subjects of his humorous and satiric verse 
had not all gone into darkness before his 
inspiration and power came. 

But the poetical career was not to begin 
at once. Various symptoms had shown 
the anxious father that the Benjamin of 
the family was addicted to rhyming, and 
he was inclined to connect this folly with 
his son's indolence. So after many exhor- 
tations, and perhaps tears, he exacted a 
promise from the young man that he would 
make no more verses, but betake himself 
to serious study. The law was chosen, — 
a common resource when a student has no 
vocation for anything, — and after some two 
years the degree of LL. B. was achieved. 
Practice, however, has small connection with 
theory; and it was evident from Lowell's 
story, " My First Client " that his practice 
was a good joke. Notes scribbled on the 
waste paper of his desk began to take met- 
rical form. The renunciation of the Muses 
did not hold, and would not hold, as the 
father could not fail to see. Pegasus was 
restive harnessed to a cart. 

But a warning should be interposed. 

" ' Tisnot the singer's wish that makes the song." 



RENOUNCING "THE WORLD" 23 

The youth who dabbles in verse gener- 
ally deceives himself. Young pretender! 
if you have to seek poetic phrase and rhyme, 
stop! The tripod of the ancient oracle 
was not worked by a pump. But if the 
Muse seeks you, follows you, haunts you, 
you will not stop ; you cannot. 

Another development was in progress. 
From a gay youth, fond of chaffing, and 
ready to jeer at abolitionists, Lowell be- 
came a reformer and a devotee to spiritual 
life. No more complete renunciation of 
the " world w was ever made, as succeeding 
years were to show; and it was not an easy 
thing for a favorite of fortune, especially 
for one with such a buoyant nature. Love 
was the agent in this conversion. He had 
become enamoured of Miss Maria White, a 
young lady of rare beauty and noble char- 
acter. She wrote poems of unusual merit, 
and one of them, "The Alpine Sheep," is 
widely known. Chiefly she was devoted to 
the anti-slavery cause, and made her in- 
fluence felt. The change on the part of 
Lowell was not the passing whim of a 
lover, but became the steadfast purpose of 
a man. He came to see that slavery was 
a contradiction and lie in the constitution 
of a free country, and from that time 



24 THE POET AND THE MAN 

his best efforts were devoted to its over- 
throw. 

Too much stress should not be laid upon 
the good influence exerted by Miss White. 
The main features of Lowell's character 
were predestined, and its legitimate devel- 
opment could not have been long delayed. 
Miss White was young, not to say imma- 
ture, — a being all delicacy, purity, and 
ideality. Under the light of her steadfast 
eyes worldly illusions fell. To be near 
her was to live in an atmosphere of moral 
beauty. Such was the influence which 
moved her lover, — an influence of which 
neither was fully conscious. 

In his twenty-second year his first vol- 
ume of verse was published: "A Year's 
Life." Love is naturally its theme, — 
love, liberty, and lofty ideals. The collec- 
tion has not been reprinted as a whole, but 
some of the pieces have been preserved in 
the complete edition of his poems. 

Shortly after, in collaboration with his 
friend Robert Carter, he edited The Pio- 
neer, a monthly magazine for which the 
American public was not ready. The first 
number contained two short stories by 
Hawthorne, poems by Mrs. Browning, Poe, 
Whittier, and Lowell, and articles by John 



" THE PIONEER " — MARRIAGE 25 

S. Dwight, William W. Story, and others. 
Seldom was richer freight intrusted to a 
poet's argosy. The magazine came to an 
end after the third number. Probably the 
publisher's want of business qualities and 
experience was as decisive as the lack of 
public appreciation; but the literary taste 
of the United States in 1844 is not recalled 
with much pride. 

He was married in that year to the lady 
just mentioned, and shortly after was pub- 
lished a second volume, in which were 
manifest maturer power and a more mas- 
culine freedom of touch. While his devo- 
tion to his love grew more tender, he saw the 
world in a new light. He sang of the wrongs 
of the poor and the slave; of the empti- 
ness of life without conviction; the nul- 
lity of poetry without noble purpose ; the 
vapidness of preaching without piety; the 
shame of law without justice; the blank 
horror of a world without God. As time 
went on he learned to purify his style, and 
gain a surer mastery of expression, but this 
early impulse ceased only with his life. 
Some of these poems glow with the beau- 
tiful enthusiasm of youth ; they give hope 
for uplifting the fallen; they rebuke the 
strife of sects with parables of Christian 



26 THE POET AND THE MAN 

love. The most vigorous of these is "The 
Present Crisis," passages from which have 
been repeated by public speakers ever 
since. Were it not for an incongruous 
figure in the final couplet, this would be 
an ideal prophetic poem. 

But, at the time when they appeared, 
such a view of Lowell's early poems would 
have been received with almost universal 
derision. Before 1850 an ordinary Bos- 
tonian, as well as most people " in soci- 
ety," would have said, if inquired of, that 
Lowell was a hare-brained fellow with 
some knack at verse-making, — a friend 
of fanatics and come-out-ers, like Abby 
Folsom and Father Lamson, a man out of 
touch with the world, and a dreamer of 
Utopian dreams. And, so much is the 
judgment controlled by personal prejudice, 
few critics were disposed to consider his 
claims as a poet. He was more frequently 
pooh-poohed than praised, and his books 
had very few buyers. It would have 
greatly astonished the exalted society in 
which Everett, Ticknor, Prescott, Hillard, 
and Harvard professors moved, if it had 
been foretold that this long-haired youth, 
who consorted with Garrison and other 
impossible folk, and sat without shame 



A PAIR OF IDEALISTS 2J 

with women-orators and freed slaves upon 
public platforms, would in forty years be 
one of the most distinguished of Ameri- 
cans, a satirist and poet of world-wide fame ; 
one of the few great writers of brilliant and 
learned prose, and the most honored pf 
foreign ministers. 

It may be well here at the outset to take 
a look at him and his wife. The portraits 
of this pair of idealists painted by William 
Page still hang in the sombre entrance hall 
at Elmwood; she, with refined features, 
transparent skin, starry blue eyes, and 
smooth bands of light brown hair; he, with 
serious face and eyes in shadow; with 
ruddy, wavy, and glossy auburn hair, falling 
almost to the shoulders, a full reddish 
beard, wearing a coarse-textured brown coat 
and a broad linen collar turned carelessly 
down. There are few modern portraits in 
which costume counts for so little, and soul 
for so much. In Page's time the poet's eyes 
and forehead, though suggestive of great 
possibilities, were calm as a boy's; the for- 
bidding wrinkles and nervous contractions 
between and above the eyebrows, shown 
in more recent portraits, were the results 
of the long and painful studies of later 
years. 



28 THE POET AND THE MAN 

It was a time of productiveness as well 
as bliss. Literatures were explored, though 
discursively, sketches were made, and 
poems born. There would have been little 
in life to ask, but for the increasing 
fragility of his wife, and the early death 
of their children. Of four or five born in 
their nine years of wedlock only one sur- 
vived. 1 The plainly dressed couple, at 
whose Titianesque portraits we have just 
looked, lived very simply, and wholly 
apart from the fashionable world. They 
were devoted to each other and to all good 
works, looking for the speedy coming of 
truth and righteousness. Generous and 
beautiful illusion! How dark the world 
would be to young hearts, if they were to 
see it as after three-score it appears to be ! 
There was a season just before the up- 
heavals of 1848 when an ardent faith was 
in the air, especially with abolitionists and 
other spiritually minded people. They were 
confident that slavery, poverty, and crime 
were to disappear, and human brotherhood 
was to create a new heaven upon earth. It 
was to this end that the poetry and the 
daily aspirations of Lowell tended. It is 
said that at one period, with the intent of 

1 Mrs. Edward Burnett. 



A LOVER OF NATURE 29 

doing away with social distinctions, the 
old family servants were bidden to the 
table of the master and mistress; but this 
was soon felt to be an inconvenience, and 
the custom did not long continue. 

His love of nature was an absorbing pas- 
sion, and led him to make excursions in 
all the region about Cambridge. He fol- 
lowed the silver windings of the Charles, 
and mused under the spreading willows; 
he roamed through the fringe of woods 
about Fresh Pond; he climbed the heights 
of Belmont, or loitered among the Waverley 
oaks, — huge trees of unknown age, which 
stand as if grouped for a Corot, — or wan- 
dered along Beaver Brook, whose pretty 
cascade and ruined mill are souvenirs of 
one of his most perfect poems; or, more 
frequently still, he lingered among the 
wooded knolls of the neighboring cemetery, 
destined to be his final resting-place. 

When out for a walk nothing escaped 
him, — not the plumage of a bird, the leaf- 
age of a tree, the color of a blossom, nor 
a trait upon a human countenance. He 
knew almost every bird by its note, its 
color, and its flight. He knew where flow- 
ers grew, and when they should appear. 
All this knowledge might have been pos- 



30 THE POET AND THE MAN 

sessed by some observer with little senti- 
ment, but it was with eyes of love that 
Lowell looked upon the world. It is a 
beautiful touch in one of his dialect poems 
where he says, — 

" An' th' airth don't git put out with me 
That love her 's though she was a woman: 
Why th' ain't a bird upon a tree 
But half forgives my bein' human." 

In later years he made more distant 
trips, to Moosehead Lake and to the Adi- 
rondacks, where (in company with Agassiz, 
Wyman, Emerson, Howe, and Stillman) 
he met lumbermen, trappers, and deer- 
stalkers, and came to know — 

"The shy, wood-wandering brood of Character." 



THE COMING OF HOSEA 3 1 



III 

The war with Mexico (1846) was brought 
on for the purpose of gaining new territory 
for the extension of slavery. The action 
of Polk's administration was looked upon 
with shame and anger by most Northern 
men. No one was deceived by the base 
official declaration that war existed by the 
act of Mexico ; yet from various motives 
of interest, — political, personal, and "re- 
ligious," nearly all influential people con- 
tinued to oppose the agitation of the 
question of slavery, — the cause of the war 
and of most of the troubles of the time. 

Lowell was one day in a lawyer's office 
in Court Square, Boston, when there was 
heard without the unusual sound of fife 
and drum. It soon appeared that it was 
a call for volunteers for a Massachusetts 
regiment, and the poet's quick indigna- 
tion rose ; but his good sense and native 
humor soon got the better of his wrath. 
His friends in the office, one of whom re- 



32 THE POET AND THE MAN 

lated the incident to the writer, 1 long re- 
membered the keen light in his eyes, and 
his caustic comments upon the humiliat- 
ing scene. A few days later in the Bos- 
ton Courier appeared anonymously the first 
poem of Hosea Biglow, introduced with 
grave and felicitous humor by Rev. Homer 
Wilbur, delighting the anti-slavery party, 
and gradually setting the whole Northern 
people in crepitating chuckles of laughter. 
It was as in France where once an epigram 
might shake a throne. Men upon whom 
the inflexible logic of Garrison was wasted, 
who had listened unmoved to the matchless 
eloquence of Wendell Phillips, and read 
with indifference the burning verse of Whit- 
tier, gave in without parley to this new 
assault. Every one felt that this ballad 
embodied the common-sense, the religious 
convictions, the Puritan grit, and the hu- 
mane feelings of the North. The con- 
centrated energy was resistless. But it 
was something more ; the sharp thrusts in 
rustic phrase, the native wit, and the irony 
which played upon the lines, making them 
like live electric wires, produced a combi- 
nation of mirth and conviction that was 
wholly new. Unlike the unheeded logic, 

1 Judge Robert I. Burbank. 



THE FORCE OF COMEDY 33 

eloquence, and burning verse, the comic 
and catching rhymes went everywhere as on 
wings ; and while men repeated the drol- 
leries the deeper import sank into their 
hearts. Other poems followed, a running 
fire of sarcasm hard to bear. As the war 
went on the position of its Northern sup- 
porters became pitiable. 

It seems strange to remember that Sum- 
ner, while he praised the points made by 
the then unknown Yankee poet, regretted 
that the ballad had not been written in 
English. But Sumner had no sense of 
humor, and did not see that not only the 
comedy, but the argument, gained force 
from the dialect. Thus, to say the New 
Testament teaches that war is wrong, is 
not a very startling proposition; but when 
Hosea says, — 

" We kind o' thought Christ went ag'in war an' pil- 
lage, 
An' thet eppylets wern't the best mark of a saint," 

the sidelong irony offers to the adversary a 
cutting edge instead of a handle. 

The parson, too, is by no means an un- 
important character, being a delightful and 
necessary complement to his irrepressible 
parishioner and protege, He has the high 



34 THE POET AND THE MAN 

sense of honor and ingenuousness of Colonel 
Newcome, a little of the serious whimsical- 
ity of Don Quixote, and a trace of an 
old-fashioned preacher's pedantry and pro- 
siness. He is strong in quotation from 
unexpected sources, and often makes an 
apt stroke. He is distinctly a humorous 
character. 

Wit and humor are often confounded, and 
as often bunglingly denned. Landor says, 
"Who ever has humor has wit, although 
it does not follow that who ever has wit 
has humor. Humor is wit appertaining 
to character, and indulges in breadth of 
drollery, rather than in play and brilliancy 
of point." Wit sparkles and explodes in 
fireworks; humor is exuberant, consistent 
in inconsistency, causing an easy ripple of 
mirth. Wit is more common than humor, 
for humor is an attribute of genius. Low- 
ell's creations are humorous, though some 
of them scatter witticisms like rice at a 
wedding. 

"The Biglow Papers" is like no other 
book ; the comedy begins with the title-page, 
and overruns the index. " The Notices of 
an Independent Press w are delightful bur- 
lesques of the methods of certain newspaper 
reviewers. The prefaces, notes, and com- 



A YANKEE IDYL 35 

ments are in perfect keeping; serious in 
one view, jocose in another: there is a 
back-handed stroke in them all. It is not 
risking much to say that it is the wittiest 
and best-sustained satire in English. 

When the book was being printed there 
was a vacant page which it was thought 
should be filled. For that space Lowell 
wrote off-hand the now famous ballad of 
"The Courtin'," containing six stanzas, 
printed as an excerpt from a supposititious 
newspaper notice. In a subsequent edition 
he added six more, and in the collected 
poems there are twenty-four. Though the 
first sketch contained the substance, yet 
the added stanzas so fill out and heighten 
the picture that not one of them can be 
pronounced superfluous. This ballad may 
be regarded as a trifle by some, but it is a 
Flemish picture of manners and speech 
in the last generation, exquisite in feeling 
and treatment ; in fact, one of those miracu- 
lous trifles in which the comic and tender 
elements are vitally blended; which only 
genius creates, and which the hearts of 
mankind will forever preserve. We may 
smile at Huldy and Zekel, but their Cour- 
tin' is a repetition of the world-old drama, 
the same in palace as in farm-house, to 



36 THE POET AND THE MAN 

which no son or daughter of Eve can be 
indifferent. 

To this period of exaltation and exuber- 
ance belongs "The Vision of Sir Laun- 
fal," based upon one of the legends of 
King Arthur's knights. Any summary of 
the beautiful story would be a profanation; 
it is enough to say that it is a lesson of 
brotherly love set in a parable of holy 
beauty. The prelude of the first part is a 
description of the sights, sounds, and odors 
of springtime in New England; of the sec- 
ond, the keen splendors of our Northern 
winter. The spring prelude is all move- 
ment and ecstasy, and came to the poet 
in a happy hour when he had only to dip 
his pen in ink. Passages from this are 
continually appearing in the newspapers; 
young editors rediscover it, and must forth- 
with display specimens. The whole poem 
is the overflow of a full heart, and its com- 
position occupied less than two days, dur- 
ing which he scarcely ate or slept. It is 
by far the most popular of his serious 
poems. 

"A Fable for Critics" purports to be a 
view of a procession of American authors 
defiling before Apollo. It follows in plan 
Leigh Hunt's mild "Feast of Poets,"— 



A PASQUINADE 37 

but with a difference. The title-page, in 
black and red, tells us that it was — 

" Set forth in October, the 21st day, 

In the year '48. G. P. Putnam, Broadway. 

The rhymed preface prepares us to fol- 
low a masked harlequin in a frolic. Never 
in the New World was there a parallel 
instance of exultant audacity. It is the 
gay humor of a youth in the freedom of 
an anonymous pasquinade, — revelling in 
puns, clashing unexpected and all-but-im- 
possible rhymes like cymbals, tossing off 
grotesque epithets and comparisons, and 
going in a break-neck canter, like that 
of a race-horse let loose. And yet, under- 
neath the fun and riot, we find outline por- 
traits and swift estimates which, though 
not always wholly just, are of marvellous 
acuteness and force. Some of the sketches, 
— for instance, those of Emerson, Parker, 
Willis, Hawthorne andWhittier, — in their 
general faithfulness and power of dis- 
crimination, are the most lifelike minia- 
tures ever made of these men. The sharp 
and philosophic discrimination between 
Emerson and Carlyle, done so long ago as 
1 $48, and by a youth of twenty-nine, is 
something to think of. The uproar raised 



38 THE POET AND THE MAN 

by lesser authors, who were omitted, and 
by friends of Margaret Fuller, who was 
thought to be lampooned as Miranda, sub- 
sided in time; and to-day most critics 
agree that this early satirical view of Amer- 
ican literature was singularly just and pro- 
phetic, and that its hard hits and sharp 
reproofs were salutary. Its main counsel 
is to avoid imitation of foreign models, to 
be true to the ideas of the democratic New 
World, to be independent in thought and 
modest in expression, and to wait for the 
development of a worthy literature and art 
at home. Excepting " The Biglow Papers " 
and " The Vision of Sir Launfal," this poem 
is probably more read in the United States 
than any production of Lowell's. Many of 
his admirers know it by heart. 

In the same year were published two 
volumes of collected poems. 

He visited Europe in 185 1, accompa- 
nied by his wife, and returned the follow- 
ing year. Her health had long been fail- 
ing, and she died in the autumn of 1853. 

After her death he printed (privately) a 
small memorial volume of her poems, with 
a photographic copy of the beautiful por- 
trait by William Page which has been 
mentioned. 





LIFE AND DEATH 39 

On the day of her death a daughter was 
born to Longfellow, whose house was not 
far from Elmwood, and the double incident 
was the subject of one of the most imagi- 
native and exquisite of his minor poems. 
" The Two Angels." 

" 'T was at thy door, O friend ! and not at mine, 
The angel with the amaranthine wreath, 
Pausing, descended, and with voice divine 
Whispered a word that had a sound like Death. 

Then fell upon the house a sudden gloom, 

A shadow on those features fair and thin ; 

And softly, from that hushed and darkened room, 

Two angels issued, where but one went in." 



% 

40 THE POET AND THE MAN 



IV. 

For some years between 1853 and 1859, 
Lowell received a few of his Cambridge 
friends on Sunday afternoons in his study, 
a front room in the third story. On Friday 
evenings there was another gathering, os- 
tensibly for whist, at the house of each of 
the party in turn. Of those who were 
members of the whist-club, Dr. Estes Howe, 
Robert Carter, Henry Ware, and Lowell are 
dead; the survivors are John Holmes, John 
Bartlett, and the present writer. In social 
meetings Lowell was naturally the leading 
spirit, and the one whose talk no one was 
willing to miss; yet he was never the im- 
perious Johnson of the club; every one 
had his chance. The conversation took a 
wide range over literature and art, as well 
as the field of politics, on which lines of 
battle were forming, then little suspected. 
In the tranquil, peace-loving North " com- 
ing events" did not "cast their shadows 
before." 

At the period following his great loss 



HIS JOYOUS NATURE 41 

he was naturally sobered, but still gener- 
ally cheerful, and sometimes momentarily 
gay. His habitual manner had a mellow, 
autumnal glow. His serious conversation 
was suggestive and inspiring, and a sense 
of uplifting followed, as from seeing a play 
of Shakespeare, or hearing a symphony of 
Beethoven. But it was impossible for him 
to repress the bright fancies and droll con- 
ceits suggested by reading and conversa- 
tion. Wit was as natural to him as breath- 
ing, and when the mood was on he could not 
help seeing and signalling puns. But epi- 
grams and puns were the accompaniments, 
and not the end and aim of his conversation : 
his perceptions were keen and just; his 
reading had been well-nigh universal ; and, 
with his instant power of comparison, his 
judgments were like intuitions. But his 
discourse often took on an airy and tanta- 
lizing form, and wreathed itself in irony, 
or flowered in simile, or exploded in arti- 
fices, until it ended in some merry absurd- 
ity. Such play of argument, fancy, humor, 
word-twisting, and sparkling nonsense was 
seldom witnessed, except in the talk of the 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. At the 
whist-table, when he was in a flow of spirits, 
the deal was often interrupted by his 



42 THE POET AND THE MAN 

audacious inventions, his deft touches in 
dressing a story, his assumption of Yankee 
shrewdness or clownishness, or his mimicry 
of antique pedants. Sometimes he would 
assu?7ie an imaginary character, and sustain 
it during an evening. Once when a mem- 
ber's birthday fell on the day of the club's 
meeting, Lowell preceded the guest to 
the supper-room, walking backward, hold- 
ing a pair of great silver candlesticks, and 
bowing, like a lord-chamberlain ushering a 
king. 

Before he had become worn with study 
his face was usually radiant with smiles. 
His eyes were searching at times, but be- 
nevolent, especially to people of low degree. 
A servant in the writer's house who had 
admitted Lowell one evening, said to her 
mistress in naive admiration, " I declare, 
ma'am, Mr. Lowell has the coaxinest eyes I 
ever see wid a man." 

At that period he was nearing the acme 
of his powers. 

His passion for nature was kept alive 
by walks in surrounding country, and by 
occasional trips to aboriginal forests. It 
was the time of anemones, cardinal flowers, 
bobolinks, robins, and cat-birds ; of Maine 
lakes and Adirondack forests ; of Arthurian 



TRIFLES SIGNIFICANT 43 

legends, and idyls of Huldah and Zekel. 
These by and by were to give way to the 
exhausting study of Dante, to the burden 
of criticism and the production of poems 
like "The Cathedral." He was lithe, 
mobile, and impressionable in mind and 
body, and at his best for the enjoyment of 
life and for the delight of friends. 

As an abolitionist or free-soiler he was in 
no danger of being lionized. " Society " in 
Boston and Cambridge forgave no friend of 
the slave until long after ; and at that time 
Lowell seldom met any but near relatives 
or old friends. But there was a natural 
reaction against some of the austere hab- 
its of former years. The coarse-textured 
brown coat of the Page portrait was no 
longer worn, the size of the linen collar 
was retrenched, and the auburn locks were 
shorter, though carefully kept. A velvet 
jacket was in common use indoors, and 
never man lived who was more fastidious 
in the details of the toilet. All things 
were in harmony with a refined and delicate 
nature. One might as soon expect to find 
a smirch on the petals of a new Easter 
lily as upon his linen or hands. Trifles, 
but significant. A photograph exists, 
taken in 1854 or 1855, in which he is rep- 



44 THE POET AND THE MAN 

resented sitting with his face partly in 
profile. The hair is long (according to 
modern notions), falling in soft waves, and 
completely covering the ears. The face 
appears tranquil when viewed at a dis- 
tance, but on closer inspection there is 
perceived a subtle smile of which the lines 
are as elusive as those around the mouth of 
da Vinci's La Gioconda. Two of his friends 
of the whist-club had gone with him to the 
photographer's; some good stories were 
told, and the picture shows that the gleam 
of fun had scarcely left the sitter's face. 
This curious, nickering expression was 
somehow lost in the engraving afterwards 
made from the picture. 

In 1854 Lowell delivered a course of 
twelve lectures on the British Poets at the 
Lowell Institute. They were not printed 
at the time, except partially, in newspaper 
reports, but doubtless many of their ideas 
were absorbed in the published essays. In 
these lectures the qualities of his prose 
style began to be manifest. It was felt by 
every hearer to be the prose of a poet, as 
it teemed with original images, fortunate 
epithets, and artistically wrought allusions, 
and had a movement and music all its own. 
A few friends from Cambridge attended 



THE POET AS FINANCIER 45 

these lectures, walking into the city, and 
more than once in deep snow. The lec- 
turer humorously acknowledged his indebt- 
edness to them, saying that when he saw 
their faces he was in presence of his 
literary conscience. These lectures have 
not been published as yet, and may not 
be. 

In 1855, Longfellow having resigned his 
place as professor of modern languages 
and literature in Harvard College, Lowell 
was appointed his successor, with leave of 
absence, that he might perfect himself in 
his studies. He went to Germany, passing 
most of his time at Dresden, but did not 
remain so long as he had intended. In 
later years he gave an amusing explanation 
of his premature return ; and the story, per- 
haps, is not unworthy of being repeated, 
as it is the thistle-downs of humor which 
are apt to be blown away from stately bi- 
ographies. Lowell told the story at a 
whist-party. "I had given instructions," 
he said, " to my bankers in London to no- 
tify me when my balance was reduced to 
a certain sum ; and then I settled myself 
to my studies, keeping no account of the 
drafts I drew from time to time. I sup- 
posed I had still a good sum to the fore, 



46 THE POET AND THE MAN 

and a pleasant time in prospect; but I 
was surprised one day to receive notice 
that my account had touched the figure I 
had mentioned. There was nothing to do 
but pack up and go home, which I did. 
Mark the sequel ! Some years afterward I 
received a letter from the bankers, stating 
that owing to the error of a clerk I had 
been charged with a draft for so-and-so- 
many pounds, which ought to have been 
debited to the account of a kinsman of mine ; 
and that sum, with compound interest, was 
subject to my order. They regretted the 
inconvenience I had suffered by the short- 
ening of my visit, and, by way of compen- 
sation, they suggested an investment — if 
I did not need the money at once — which 
they thought would turn out well. I 
thanked them and asked them to invest 
the money as they thought best. Well, in 
a year I got a draft for near ^700. With 
that I refurnished my house. Now you, 
who are always preaching figures, and Poor 
Richard, and business habits, what do you 
say to that ? If I had kept an account and 
known how it stood, I should have spent that 
money, and you would not now be sitting in 
those easy-chairs, or walking on a Wilton 
carpet. No, hang accounts and figures!" 



COSTLY CIDER BOTTLES 47 

Before the laughter subsided, Dr. Estes 
Howe (his brother-in-law) said he was able 
to add a story which would further illus- 
trate Lowell's original financial methods. 
Said the doctor, "James, as you know, has 
some good apple-trees; and a few years 
ago he made a quantity of cider, and then 
set about looking for bottles. He found a 
good number and filled them, but still there 
was a surplus of cider. So what did he 
do, but ask half a dozen friends to supper, 
send in to Parker's for the 'feed, ' and to 
Pierce's for a case of champagne, merely 
to get bottles for that cider ! " 

This was Lowell's airy way in early life, 
when at leisure; and this characteristic 
trait cannot be omitted in any account of 
him. But all things had their turn. After 
a period of indolence he would take to 
his desk, where he " toiled terribly. " In 
serious talk he was as strenuous as any of 
his Puritan ancestors. To the world he 
was courteous, but reserved, with a due 
mingling of dignity; to inferiors, especially 
generous and considerate ; to the vulgar and 
presuming, a glacier; to his family and 
near friends, the most delightful and sun- 
shiny being that ever came from the Au- 
thor of joy. 



THE POET AND THE MAN 



V. 

The Atlantic Monthly was started in the 
autumn of 1857. It was the project of a 
young enthusiast, who desired to bring the 
literary influence of New England to aid 
the anti-slavery cause. Four years before 
(1853), the magazine was to have been 
undertaken by the publisher of " Uncle 
Tom's Cabin ;" but when all things ap- 
peared to be ready he changed his mind 
and declined to go on. For that magazine 
Lowell sent his poem "The Oriole's Nest." 
After that the projector continued his con- 
ferences and correspondence with leading 
writers, and, the due co-operation hav- 
ing been secured, the . firm of Phillips, 
Sampson, & Co., was finally induced to 
become the publishers. The influence 
which brought this about came largely 
from Mrs. Stowe, who saw Mr. Phillips 
almost daily, and from Mr. William Lee, 
a junior member of the firm. The pro- 
jector, who then lived in Cambridge, natu- 
rally consulted his neighbors, Lowell and 



A/it4c a*di~s /#+*& &&"&<,/* oa. /AiuC 
l/iL*.J*eA4L thy tji**- & Po+Jd 

2- 
/>£*. for*, $L K4**Sjt*<d£. Or»y 
Jb. Orudis, A^&T fyfa'u-xO faa^fr, 
7v&&slC jtfott* 04S& *U**S j 

The stanzas in fac simile are from a poem first entitled 
•' The Oriole's Nest." The MSS. in possession of the author 
"bear the date of 1S53. 



ORIGIN OF "THE ATLANTIC 1 ' 49 

Longfellow. It is not to be understood 
that it was ever intended to make the mag- 
azine an organ, or that it should be, ex- 
cept occasionally, a vehicle of anti-slavery 
doctrine. At that time literary periodi- 
cals in the United States were professedly 
neutral, but most were really subservient 
to pro-slavery interests. The bulk of the 
matter of the new magazine was to be lit- 
erary and not controversial ; but it was in- 
tended there should be frequent political 
articles to indicate its purpose. That pur- 
pose was to be the point of the arrow, or 
rather the ram of the ship ; and all the tug 
of the sails, and all the power of the screw, 
were to give it impetus. 

While public opinion and fashionable 
society were hostile, Garrison and Phillips 
preached in vain; the new project was to 
enlist society and opinion upon the right- 
eous side, by the combination of all the 
men of genius whom the public honored 
and loved. It succeeded. The new mag- 
azine made an impression from the first, 
and voices that had once hooted at the 
early abolitionists applauded the new com- 
bination of genius with moral purpose. 
The projector had come to Boston with that 
idea, and toiled for years to carry it out. 



50 THE POET AND THE MAN 

The leading authors invited to contribute, 
— eleven of them, — with two members of 
the firm of publishers (Mr. Phillips and Mr. 
Wyman), and one person who represented 
both publishers and authors (leading an 
amphibious existence between the two), 
met at a dinner to agree upon prelimina- 
ries. At that dinner the projector, having 
previously sounded Lowell, rose without 
a suggestion from any person, and without 
the knowledge of any person, — author or 
publisher, — and nominated Lowell as ed- 
itor-in-chief. He himself served as the 
assistant editor, received and answered 
the letters, and gave the first reading to 
all the myriads of contributions. 

Lowell was not methodical, and he hated 
routine work; but he applied himself stren- 
uously, and gave a high tone to the maga- 
zine. His own contributions were good, 
and often brilliant, but were not to be 
compared in general interest with the for- 
tunate stroke of Holmes. At the dinner 
just mentioned Lowell said, " I will take 
the place, as you all seem to think I should ; 
but, if success is achieved, we shall owe 
it mainly to the doctor." He continued 
(talking to the present writer) his observa- 
tions upon Holmes, in which he showed 



« ' ATLANTIC " DINNERS 5 1 

himself a psychological observer, and some- 
thing of a prophet : — 

"You see, the doctor is like a bright 
mountain stream that has been dammed 
up among the hills, and is waiting for an 
outlet into the Atlantic." (The name of 
the magazine was suggested by Holmes.) 
" You will find he has a wonderful store of 
thoughts, — serious, comic, pathetic, and 
poetic, — of comparisons, figures, and illus- 
trations. I have seen nothing of his prep- 
aration, but I imagine he is ready. It will 
be something wholly new, and his reputa- 
tion as a prose-writer will date from this 
magazine." 

These are not Lowell's words, but they 
contain the substance of what he said. 

For two years or more the monthly din- 
ners of the Atlantic contributors occurred on 
the day of publication. They were gener- 
ally at Parker's, but one was at Fontarive's 
in Winter Place, and one at Porter's in 
North Cambridge. It is a misfortune that 
no notes were kept of the table-talk. The 
gatherings were memorable, and would 
have been memorable in any city of the 
world. 

The bright, powerful, and inspired faces 
that surrounded the ellipse come to mind 



52 THE POET AND THE MAN 

almost like a sight of yesterday. Each 
guest in turn seems to fix his eyes upon 
the on-looker in this miraculous camera. 
The group is immortal ; the separate faces 
so many varying expressions of genius. 
Brilliant lights and softly luminous shades 
seem to play around the table, until the 
colors and forms are mingled as in the 
heart of a picture by Turner. There was 
Holmes in the flush of his new fame as 
the Autocrat, — a man whose genius flamed 
out in his speech and expression, as clearly 
as in his original and sparkling works. 
There was Lowell, with features of singu- 
lar power, and eyes which dazzled and 
charmed. In merriment he was irresisti- 
ble; in higher moods his face shone like 
a soul made visible. ^ There was Emerson, 
thoughtful, but shrewdly observant, and 
with the placid look of an optimistic phi- 
losopher, whose smile was a benediction; 
Longfellow, with a head which Phidias 
might have modelled, by turns calm or 
radiant, seldom speaking, but always using 
the fit word; Agassiz, glowing with good 
humor, simple in phrase and massive in 
intellect; Whittier, with noble head and 
deep-set, brilliant eyes, grown spare and 
taciturn from ill-health, an ascetic at table, 






REMEMBERED FACES 53 

eager only for intellectual enjoyment ; 
Quincy, with patrician air, curious learn- 
ing, and felicity in epigram; Dwight, with 
the sky-reaching architecture of Beetho- 
ven's symphonies in his brain; Felton, 
Greek to his fingers' ends, happy in wise dis- 
course and in Homeric laughter; Motley, 
stateliest man of his time, just about to 
depart for Europe, there to carry on his 
life-long work; Norton, the lecturer upon 
art, future editor of Carlyle's letters ; Cabot, 
a veteran contributor to the Dial; Whipple, 
with two-storied head and bulbous specta- 
cles, keen critic and good talker. There 
were frequently other writers less known 
to fame. Of those mentioned, Holmes, 
Dwight, Cabot, and Norton alone survive. 
But one constant visitor is not to be 
overlooked. This was — 

"The Jedge that covers with his hat 
More wit an' gumption, an' shrewd Yankee sense 
Than there is mosses on an ol' stone fence." 

"The Jedge " x was not a contributor; he 
called himself amicus curicz. His ready 
wit, solid ability, and social graces made 
him one of the delights of all literary gath- 
erings. He was leaving the table quite 
early one day, when M. Fontarive, who had 

1 Hon. E. Rockwood Hoar. 



54 THE POET AND THE MAN 

served a fine menu, appeared with a bowl 
of naming punch that diffused " Sabaean 
odors." Still "The Jedge" edged toward 
the door, excusing himself by saying that 
he had before him a long journey in the 
train. "Stay," said the Autocrat, "and 
take some punch; 'twill shorten the dis- 
tance."— "Yes," replied "The Jedge," 
"and double the prospect." He was as 
full of stories as Lord Cockburn, and rarely 
left the table without flinging some mot 
as a souvenir. " The Jedge " survives : 
late be his departure for the last train. 
George T. Davis, a wonderful raconteur, 
sometimes came, and the guests remained 
for hours to hear him. It is said that 
Abraham Lincoln once sat with him till 
morning, and declared he was the best 
story-teller he had ever met. John C. Wy- 
man (one of the firm of publishers) was 
also a wonderful artist in touching up a 
story, as well as a brilliant talker. His 
imitations, as of Webster's grand manner, 
were perfect, and often astounding. He is 
still fresh and vivacious, while Davis has 
"gone over to the majority." 

There was no lack of serious and even 
spiritual conversation. Holmes's fire often 
fused reasoning into eloquence; and his 



EMERSON'S ANALOGY 55 

sentences had such force, proportion, and 
finish that they would not have needed re- 
vision for print. Lowell always talked 
well, and often brilliantly. He soared 
naturally, as if the high regions of imagi- 
nation were his familiar haunts. And the 
hearer never felt that Lowell had done 
his best; for there was something like a 
restrained intensity, which gave the im- 
pression that he was always greater than 
anything he had done. Every competent 
observer felt sure that his career would be 
a crescendo. 

Emerson was fond of listening, but after 
a set-to he often made a philosophic sum- 
mary or scholium that was beautiful and 
memorable. One day Dr. Holmes was 
speaking casually of architecture, and ob- 
served that all the orders might, roughly 
speaking, be resolved into three, — the Egyp- 
tian, characterized by breadth of base ; the 
Grecian, in which there was an agreeable 
proportion between base and height ; and 
the Gothic, in which the height was ex- 
treme. Mr. Emerson sat with eyes far 
away, and said in his deep, level tone, as 
if merely communing with himself, " That 
furnishes a striking analogy. The broad- 
based Egyptian was for the repose of the 



56 THE POET AND THE MAN 

dead; the harmonious Grecian was for the 
activities and pleasures of the living, and 
the aspiring lines of the Gothic, do they 
not lead our thoughts toward immortality? " 

Volumes could have been made of the 
bright discussions which were lost in air. 
But they were not wholly lost, for they left 
their impression in the minds of survivors, 
and so have been disseminated. 

On one occasion the women contribu- 
tors were invited. Several were expected, 
but only two came, Mrs. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, and Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford. 
Mrs. Stowe had demurred at first, and only 
consented upon the stipulation that there 
should be no wine on the table. Cigars 
were, of course, out of the question. The 
condition was agreed to, for all were de- 
sirous of doing honor to the woman who 
had taken such a distinguished part in 
the great question of the day. The dinner 
passed agreeably, though the ladies did 
not have a great deal to say. Crystal jars 
and pitchers of iced water were plentiful 
along the table, and if by chance a few of 
them had a judicious mingling of some 
other pale beverage, the pervading scent 
of flowers that filled the room would have 
smothered the guilty secret. The sparkle 



PROVINCIAL DINNERS BEST 57 

of surprise in some faces when the glasses 
were raised was as good as a play. 

In all that belonged to these dinners 
there was, no doubt, a certain provincial 
note which was a great part of the charm. 
In a small city, such as Boston then was, 
there was leisure and chance for intimacy, 
and the relations of men, and especially 
of authors, were on an easy footing rarely 
attainable in a metropolis, where life is a 
struggle and the literary guild is rent with 
factions and jealousies. In Scott's Diary 
(March 7, 1827), after jotting down his im- 
pressions of a gathering in Edinburgh, he 
says, "Can London give such a dinner? 
It may, but I never saw one. They are too 
cold and critical to be so easily pleased. " 
The reader who is acquainted with our lit- 
erature, and has followed the course of 
the Atlantic, knows that in this sketch 
there is only the design to show some of the 
eminent early contributors. An account 
of that magazine would include a great 
many brilliant writers whose fame at the 
beginning was not so conspicuous. Promi- 
nent among these are Col. T.W. Higginson, 
John T.Trowbridge, and Rose Terry Cooke. 
Prescott wrote, but he was in delicate health, 
and (in his mature years at least) was not 
clubable. 



58 THE POET AND THE MAN 

During the first two years Lowell wrote 
a number of political articles, a few poems, 
and a great many book-notices. His con- 
tributions were more interesting and of 
greater force after 1862, when he was free 
from the duties of editor. 

At the beginning the editor's salary was 
three thousand dollars, — receiving also 
pay for his contributions like the others. 
The usual rates for the best writers were 
ten dollars a page for prose, and an average 
of fifty dollars for a poem. The Atlantic 
was not able to pay the prices given to 
leading authors to-day. But Lowell and 
the fraternity were fully satisfied. 



HIS SECOND MARRIAGE 59 



VI. 



In 1857, not far from the time when 
the Atlantic was started, Lowell was mar- 
ried to Miss Frances Dunlap of Portland, 
Me. The ceremony was performed accord- 
ing to the rite of the Episcopal Church 
by his brother Robert. Miss Dunlap be- 
longed to a good family, and was possessed 
of a fine mind and quiet force of character. 
She was a most attractive woman without 
being remarkably beautiful. Her profile 
was Greek, her hair luxuriant, and her 
calm eyes sweetly expressive. She had 
been well taught, and, for some time pre- 
vious to the marriage, had had charge of 
the education of Lowell's daughter, his 
only living child. She gained the respect 
and affection of all Lowell's relatives and 
friends. Simplicity, dignity, and grace 
were charmingly blended in her manners. 

After his marriage Lowell went to live 
with Dr. Estes Howe in a house near the 
college grounds. Dr. Howe's wife was a 
sister of Maria White Lowell. He was 



60 THE POET AND THE MAN 

greatly esteemed, and by his intimates 
heartily loved. He was a member of the 
whist-club, and a guest at all the literary 
dinners. The affection between him and 
Lowell was tender and constant. After a 
time Lowell went back to Elmwood to live. 
He was most happy in his marriage, as 
his wife shared his tastes, and was a woman 
to be loved. 

He had never been a steady worker, 
which is not remarkable in a poet; beyond 
that, he was dilatory and procrastinating to 
such a degree that, without some (carefully 
concealed) encouragement, he might have 
gone on indefinitely, — 

". Involved in a paulopost-future of song." 

His wife was surely his good angel, and 
the results of his labors after his second 
marriage show that he had been animated 
by new resolution. In writing a poem like 
"The Cathedral," there was great strain 
upon his vital forces; and when such a 
work was in progress her unobstrusive min- 
istrations were soothing and sustaining. 

She died in London while her husband 
was minister. No children were born of 
the marriage. 



WHO WERE FREE-SOILERS ? 6 1 

Before commenting upon the second se- 
ries of " Biglow Papers, " it may be of service 
to make a brief statement for the benefit of 
younger readers; for it must be remem- 
bered that a generation has grown up since 
the Civil War. There were two distinct 
classes of anti-slavery men. Lowell began 
with one, and afterward acted with the 
other. One was the party of Garrison and 
Phillips, known as abolitionists, which re- 
lied solely upon moral influences. The 
other brought the question into politics, en- 
deavoring to restrain slavery by law, to pre- 
vent its spreading into free territory, and to 
make it the strictly limited exception, in- 
stead of the masterful and aggressive rule, 
in the republic. This was called at first 
the Liberty Party, then the Free-Soil Party, 
and was always a minor third as against 
the Whigs and Democrats, until, in the 
campaign for the election of Lincoln in 
i860, it was consolidated with the former 
under the name of Republican. The 
Wilmot Proviso (proposed by David Wil- 
mot, M.C., of Pennsylvania) had been the 
prominent issue for a number of years. It 
was designed to exclude slavery from the 
Territories, which previous to becoming 
States are under the control of Congress. 



62 THE POET AND THE MAN 

The cry of the Free-Soilers, was " Freedom 
national, slavery sectional." The Proviso 
was staved off, could not be made law; but 
what was done proved effectual in the end, — 
namely, each Territory when about to be- 
come a State was allowed to choose between 
freedom and slavery. Then ensued a race 
for the occupation of the coming new States 
such as the world had never seen. The 
party of freedom won Kansas and Nebraska 
by superior activity, organization, and re- 
sources, but not without long and violent 
contests with murderous " border ruffians,' 7 
the partisans of slavery from the adjacent 
State of Missouri. Some of the most 
thrilling incidents in American history are 
to be found in the record of this life-and- 
death struggle, in which John Brown of 
Ossawatomie played a leading part. 

A passage in the second series (No. Two) 
refers to this glorious result : — 

"O strange New World, that yit wast never young, 
Whose youth from thee by gripin' need was wrung, 

******** 

An' who grew'st strong thru shifts an' wants an' 

pains, 
Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains, 
******** 



"hosea" in the civil war 63 

Thou, skillechby Freedom an' by gret events, 

To pitch new states ez Old World men pitch tents, 

******** 
The grave's not dug where traitor hands shall lay 
In fearful haste thy murdered corse away." 

Some of these lines may challenge -com- 
parison with the most vigorous in the 
language. 

After this crushing defeat came the elec- 
tion of Abraham Lincoln; and then the 
leaders in the slave-holding States, seeing 
that all was lost, brought about secession 
from the Union, and took up arms for a 
Southern Confederacy. 

Before long Lowell bethought him of the 
characters and stage properties of his old 
comedy, and brought out from retirement 
Hosea Biglow, Parson Wilbur, and Birdo- 
fredum Sawin to figure in a new drama; 
deepest of tragedies it proved to be for 
him. The scampish volunteer of the Mex- 
ican War had become a slaveholder and 
secessionist, and furnished what matter for 
satire he might ; while Hosea was the mouth- 
piece of moral convictions, of patriotic fer- 
vor, and of faith in the indestructible unity 
of a free nation, — a unity not too dearly 
bought, even with the blood of the best and 
dearest. The Mexican War, though dis- 



64 THE POET AND THE MAN 

graceful, was waged on foreign soil, and, 
in modern view, a small affair. The War 
of the Rebellion was an ever-present and 
tremendous fact, and while it lasted there 
was no room, within or without, for any- 
thing else. The new series is* wholly oc- 
cupied with matters connected with the 
war, and naturally wants much of the comic 
relief of its predecessor; but it is an error 
to think it inferior as poetry. Probably 
the most forcible part is that in which the 
poet deals with the course of Great Britain 
in favoring the Rebellion, — the dialogue 
between Concord Bridge and Bunker's Hill 
Monument, — followed by the regretful, 
manly, and ringing reproaches in "Jona- 
than to John." The prefatory letter of 
Parson Wilbur is, in its way, a more effec- 
tive statement of the case of the seizure of 
Mason and Slidell than any made by Sec- 
retary Seward. 

Two other poems of the series (Nos. six 
and ten) should be mentioned, because they 
are at Lowell's high-water mark, and cannot 
be easily paralleled in verse of our time. 
" Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line " contains 
pictures of spring in the country which in 
completeness, felicity, and vividness excel 
all his descriptions in serious verse. It is 



"hosea's" masterpiece 65 

an almanac of blossoms and bird-notes, 
with scarcely a blank page left for a contin- 
uator. Hosed } s interview with a Puritan 
ancestor, which forms the sequel, is in the 
poet's most vigorous manner. He truly 
says of the Yankee dialect, — 

" For puttin' in a downright lick 
' Twixt Humbug's eyes there's few can metch it, 
An' then it helves my thought ez slick 
Ez stret-grained hickory doos a hetchet.'' 

" A Letter to the Editor of the Atlantic 
Monthly" (No. ten) is a poem of which no 
description can give an adequate notion. 
It winds its way with an apparent artless- 
ness ; with hints of tender and half -humor- 5 
ous thought; with glimpses of rural scenes, 
and of "farm-smokes, sweetest sight on 
airth; " and with a melancholy sense of the 
merciless obsession of the war. Then it 
breaks into an agony of lament for the 
young heroes fallen in battle, and closes 
with an apostrophe to Peace which few who 
are old enough to remember those terrible 
days can read, even for the twentieth time, 
with dry eyes. It is not Peace coming " as 
a mourner bowed" that is invoked, but 

Peace — 

" with hand on hilt, 
And step that proves her Victory's daughter." 



66 THE POET AND THE MAN 

The reader seems to have slowly as- 
cended a hill like Pisgah, and is facing a 
prospect that awes him to silence. No 
description can convey this eloquence of 
the heart. It rouses emotions, at least in 
those who knew the awful war, which we 
must call sublime. 

Mention was made of his nephew Put- 
nam. Another, Lieutenant James Jackson 
Lowell, was killed at Seven Pines; the 
third, General Charles Russell Lowell, at 
Winchester. The last-named was wounded 
while leading a charge of cavalry; and, 
though he knew the wound was mortal, he 
was helped upon his horse, and headed 
another brilliant charge, in which he was 
again hit, and died the next day. It is 
this heroic act, never surpassed, which is 
referred to in the lines following. They 
are often repeated at the reunions of the 
veterans of the war. 



1 Rat-tat-tat-tattle thru the street 

I hear the drummers makiu' riot, 
An' I set thinkin' o' the feet 

Thet follered once, an' now are quiet, — 
White feet, ez snowdrops innercent, 

That never knowed the paths p' Sat'n, 
Whose comin' step ther's ears thet won't, 

No, not lifelong, leave off awaitin'. 



THE "N. A. REVIEW" 6j 

Why, haint I held 'em on my knee ? 

Didn't I love to see 'em growin', 
Three likely lads ez wal could be, 

Hahnsome an' brave, an' not tu knowin' ? 
I set an' look into the blaze, 

Whose natur', jes like theirn, keeps climbin', 
Ez long 'z it lives, in shinin' ways, 

An' half despise myself for rhymin'. 

Wut's words tu them whose faith an' truth 

On War's red techstone rang true metal, 
Who ventered life an' love an' youth 

For the gret prize o' death in battle ? — 
To him — who, deadly hurt, agen 

Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 
Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 

Thet rived the Rebel line asunder ? " 

For nearly ten years (1863-1872) Low- 
ell, in collaboration with Charles Eliot 
Norton, was editor of the North American 
Review, in which many of his essays ap- 
peared. This was a scholarly and sedate 
periodical, whose history began with the be- 
ginnings of our literature. It was read and 
respected by cultivated people, but made 
no appeal to the general public by means 
of sensational articles or vaunted names. 
Its subscribers and friends appreciated 
thorough and finished essays, such as 
Lowell's and Norton's, — essays of which a 
larger public, a public of a hundred thou- 
sand, would be easily tired. 



68 THE POET AND THE MAN 

The " Commemoration Ode " (1865), con- 
sidered by many as the best of the poems 
called out by the war, made a powerful 
impression. Some readers, perhaps, need 
to be informed that there was a proposal 
to erect a Memorial Hall in honor of the 
sons of Harvard who fell in the Civil War, 
and that the Ode was read at a gathering 
of the friends of the university. The noble 
hall, with Norman tower, which has since 
arisen, and which forms such a landmark, 
needs only the mellowing touch of age to 
become one of the most impressive of col- 
legiate buildings. The Ode was recited 
in a broad tent set up near the college 
grounds, following an address by General 
Meade, the hero of Gettysburg. Lowell 
usually appeared composed, if not cold, in 
public; but on this occasion his voice and 
manner showed that the scene and the sub- 
ject had wholly possessed him. The white 
illumination of his features, as he warmed 
to the impassioned close of the poem, was 
like a transfiguration. The effect upon the 
great assembly of people, who, with flushed, 
or eager, or tearful faces, followed every 
line with breathless attention, was some- 
thing never to be forgotten. The memories 
of the war then were like half-healed 
wounds. 






Mr. Lowell in Later Middle Life. 



UNDER THE WILLOWS 69 



VII. 

"Under The Willows/' published in 
1869, and dedicated to Norton, contains 
the best work of the poet's maturer years, 
together with some lighter pieces of an' 
earlier date. The title comes from a group 
of large sr^ading trees on the bank of 
Charles S^PK a favorite resort of students. 
With few exceptions these poems presup- 
pose too much in ordinary readers to be 
widely popular. This is not the case with 
"The First Snow Fall," which, like "The^ 
Changeling" and "She Came and Went," 
in a former volume, is as simple and touch- 
ing as a white stone for a child's grave. 
Equally open to view is the theme of "The 
Dead House." But in many of the pieces 
in this volume the thought is subtile and, 
remote; and ordinary readers, if candid, 
would confess that they "did not know 
what it was all about." Lowell's mind was 
fertile in recondite as well as in obvious 
allusion, and he had long dealt with ab- 
struse ideas ; so that he never reflected that 



JO THE POET AND THE MAN 

even fairly well-read people might need a 
clew to his meaning. He was never wil- 
fully obscure, like Browning, but his 
thought is often to be sought for. 

Like every collection of true poetry, this 
book is a gathering of the memories and 
fancies of years ; each one an ideal replica 
of some experience or mood. Thus, " Gold 
Egg" is a reminiscence of German Univer- 
sity life, a misty blending of metaphysics, 
mythology, and the " Arabian Nights," — 
dissimilarities conjured into a strange har- 
mony by the magic of genius. ^^A Winter 
Evening Hymn to My Fire," written almost 
forty years ago, is a fantasy in verse of free 
movement, and is itself as airy as flame. 
The devotee of tobacco will smile at the 
classic pedigree of the goddess Nicotia, and 
will regale himself with the picture of 

smoke that — 

" floats and curls 
In airy spires and wayward whirls, 
Or poises on its tremulous stalk 
A flower of frailest revery." 

The poem, "To John Bartlett, On His 
Sending Me a Seven-Pound Trout," is an 
example of Lowell's playful and delicate 
art. The first eager joy over the size and 
beauty of the fish is Rabelaisian. Then we 






WHERE THE FOOT PATH LEADS 7 1 

see the fisherman threading his way through 
the woodland mysteries ; then the rise, the 
struggle, and the capture, — all as vivid as 
if the scenes were before our eyes. The 
( grotesque rhymes are among the most curi- 
ous in Lowell's vocabulary. 

In other poems are sketches of sea-beaten 
Appledore, of the marshy banks of Charles 
River, or of lusty boyhood in the Cam- 
bridge of the old time. Perhaps the sub- 
tilest power of expression is seen in " The 
Foot Path," a purely ideal or transcen- 
dental poem, which leads from solid earth, 
the reader scarcely perceives how or when, 
into the realm of the infinite. 

THE FOOT PATH. 

It mounts athwart the windy hill 

Through sallow slopes of upland bare, 

And Fancy climbs with foot-fall still 
Its narrowing curves that end in air. 

By day a warmer-hearted blue 

Stoops softly to that topmost swell; 

Its thread-like windings seem a clew 
To gracious climes where all is well. 

By night, far yonder, I surmise 

An ampler world than clips my ken, 

Where the great stars of happier skies 
Commingle nobler fates of men. 



72 THE POET AND THE MAN 

I look and long, then haste me home, 
Still master of my secret rare; 

Once tried, the path would end in Rome, 
But now it leads me everywhere, 

Forever to the new it guides 

From former good, old overmuch; 

What Nature for her poets hides 
'Tis wiser to divine than clutch. 

The bird I list hath never come 
Within the scope of mortal ear; 

My prying step would make him dumb, 
And the fair tree, his shelter, sear. 

Behind the hill, behind the sky, 

Behind my inmost thought, he sings; 

No feet avail; to hear it nigh 

The song itself must lend the wings. 

Sing on, sweet bird, close hid, and raise 
Those angel stairways in my brain, 

That climb from these low-vaulted days 
To spacious sunshines far from pain. 

Sing when thou wilt, enchantment fleet, 
I leave thy covert haunt untrod, 

And envy Science not her feat 

To make a twice-told tale of God. 

They said the fairies tript no more, 
And long ago that Pan was dead; 

'Twas but that fools preferred to bore 
Earth's rind inch-deep for truth instead. 



WHAT IS SEEN 73 

Pan leaps and pipes all summer long, 
The fairies dance each full-mooned night, 

Would we but doff our lenses strong, 
And trust our wiser eyes' delight. 

City of Elf-land, just without 

Our seeing, marvel ever new, 
Glimpsed in fair weather, a sweet doubt 

Sketched-in, mirage-like on the blue. 

I build thee in yon sunset cloud, 

Whose edge allures to climb the height, 

I hear thy drowned bells inly-loud, 
From still pools dusk with dreams of night. 

Thy gates are shut to hardiest will, 

Thy countersign of long-lost speech, — 

Those fountained courts, those chambers still 
Fronting Time's far East, who shall reach? 

I know not and will never pry, 
But trust our human heart for all; 

Wonders that from the seeker fly 
Into an open sense may fall. 

Hide in thine own soul, and surprise 
The password of the unwary elves; 

Seek it, thou canst not bribe their spies; 
Unsought, they whisper it themselves. 

"The Washers of the Shroud," written 
in a high prophetic strain, recalls the aw- 
ful suspense in an early crisis in the Civil 
War. "Villa Franca" shows the Fates 



74 THE POET AND THE MAN 

dooming for his crimes Napoleon III. ; and 
it was written years before the fall of Se- 
dan. Powerful poems these last; and some 
years later they were referred to by Lowell, 
in conversation with the writer, with just 
pride in the intuitive foresight shown. But 
it should be said that he seldom spoke of 
his own works, even to friends, and almost 
never read to them a poem. 

While Lowell and a few other American 
poets have inclined to choose spiritual 
themes, the British poets have generally 
looked for subjects in common life, and 
dealt with the strong and enduring feel- 
ings, — with what is most vital in the nature 
of man. For this reason they have taken 
the stronger hold upon mankind. Landor 
says, "The human heart is the world of 
poetry; the imagination is only its atmos- 
phere." This is one reason why, since 
the prevalence of the transcendental mood 
here, poems like "Enoch Arden" and 
"Dora" have seldom been conceived. On 
the other hand, those who shun idealism 
will be in danger of falling into a real- 
ism which paralyzes and blights the finer 
sensibilities. The sturdy realist, without 
spiritual intuitions, will read with unblest 



I 



LANDSCAPE POETRY 75 

eyes not only the most exalted of Lowell's 
poems, but the essays and poems of Em- 
erson, and many of the most beautiful of 
the tales of Hawthorne. 

Tennyson was both realist and idealist; 
and with his death most of the poetry of 
the Victorian era came to an end. Mere- 
dith and Swinburne sustain the traditions. 

It may be well to mention here that in 
our poetry descriptions of landscape have 
occupied relatively a large space. In- 
stances are everywhere visible. T. Bu- 
chanan Read put all his power into "The 
Closing Scene," a magnificent autumn 
picture which is likely to endure. Bryant 
was almost exclusively a landscape artist. 
Whittier was profuse with the pictures 
which serve as introductions to many of 
his poems.- He and Lowell were the two 
conspicuously faithful of our scenery paint- 
ers, — giving not merely picturesque out- 
looks, but exact details, as in a Dutch 
masterpiece. This is not to decry their 
art, but to indicate their method by point- 
ing to the delicacy of the strokes. Long- 
fellow loved landscapes, and painted them 
well; but in his treatment there was only 
general truth, without pretence of nicety of 
detail. 



76 THE POET AND THE MAN 

Leaving one side purely scenic poems, 
which have a recognized but minor place, 
the truth appears to be that natural objects 
are important only as accessories: they are 
to support and set off the great picture; 
air and clouds are to give softness, depth 
and distance; while imagination casts its 
spell in high lights and glooms; but the 
centre and soul is in the human interest, 
— in the visible play of contending emo- 
tions, in the spectacle of heroic patience, 
of noble ambition, or of fortitude superior 
to fate. 

This is not wandering from Lowell's po- 
etry. It has, as we have seen, many phases, 
and its place in the future appears assured. 
But a subtile idealism, and a passion for 
elaborate landscape painting, though both 
qualities imply a high order of genius, do 
not take a firm hold upon the great world of 
readers. The exquisite ideal conceptions, 
and the marvellous execution of poems " in 
the pastoral line," are for the few; while 
poems in which the thought is less fine- 
spun, and which glow with emotion, or 
show the workings of the human heart, 
impress all who have any love for poetry. 

"The Cathedral," which was published 
a year later, is equally beyond the compre- 



" THE CATHEDRAL" J J 

hension of ordinary readers. In fact, there 
is no way to communicate the central ideas 
of the poem to any but trained minds. The 
story, which is of a visit to Chartres, is 
slight; the burden of the poem appears to 
be a meditation upon the Divine govern- 
ment, and its relations with man, — leading 
to an idealist's indignant protest against 
the drift of a materialistic age. Or it may 
be looked upon as the philosophy of reli- 
gion in its relations w r ith art and science in 
human life; and this is presented from 
what may be called the mediaeval view. Yet 
it is far enough from discussion, which de- 
poetizes ; and from dogmatism, which pet- 
rifies. There are many gleaming points in 
the descriptions, but the strongest impres- 
sion is made by the suggestions of faith and 
repose, w r hich, like the glimpses of beauty 
in the gray stones of the building, touch 
the heart through the imagination. 

The vocabulary for such a poem must be 
ample; no sweet simplicity is possible for 
him who would frame metaphysical con- 
ceptions in verse, or reproduce the glan- 
cing lights which an aging poet sees playing 
over old shrines and old beliefs. The tone 
is indicative of a reaction, as in the case 
of Tennyson ; painful at first to those who 



78 THE POET AND THE MAN 

once felt their pulses thrilled in reading 
"The Present Crisis'' of the one, and the 
"Locksley Hall " of the other. 

"The Cathedral " is a poem to be medi- 
tated upon, or, if the vulgarism may be par- 
doned, chewed over. It gives an earnest 
reader strange sensations. Like the edifice 
it treats of, it is incrusted with precious 
imagery, and it towers with sky-reaching 
thought. 

In 1870 were published two volumes of 
collected essays: "My Study Windows" 
and "Among My Books." A second vol- 
ume with the latter title came out in 1876. 

In 1872 he went to Europe, and did not 
return until 1874, He received honors 
from the universities of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, and was welcomed everywhere by 
men of letters. Just before he went abroad 
there appeared a series of labored articles 
upon his prose works, arguing that they 
could not become classic on account of 
their vicious style. The ground had been 
laid out like a siege by Turenne, and it 
was intended, evidently, that the offending 
essayist should have what is called "a 
good setting down." To a friend who vol- 
unteered to write a reply Lowell sent a 
note, a part of which is here given, mainly 



NOT DISTURBED BY CRITICS 79 

for the sake of the six lines of verse not 
elsewhere printed. 

Elm wood, 12th May, 1871. 
. . . " Don't bother yourself with any sympathy 
for me under my supposed sufferings from critics. I 
don't need it in the least. If a man does anything 
good, the world always finds it out sooner or later; 
and, if he doesn't, the world finds that out too — and 
ought. 

" ' Gainst monkey's claw and ass's hoof 
My studies forge me mail of proof : 
I climb through paths forever new 
To purer air and broader view. 
What matter though they should efface, 
So far below, my footstep's trace ! " 

He was resolute all his life to make no 
reply to criticism of his works or of his 
politics. 

The death of Agassiz, which occurred in 
1874, was the subject of a poem which is 
much more than a personal tribute. It is 
of considerable length, varied in its themes, 
dignified in movement, and forms a monu- 
ment which will outlast brass and marble. 
Besides the reminiscences of loving inti- 
macy, the work shows a poet's power in 
lines of description which burn into the 
memory, and a poet's mastery of sustained 
philosophic thought. The great Helvetian 



80 THE POET AND THE MAN 

stands before us as in life. No one ever 
saw him but had a vivid impression of virile 
and engaging personality. The noble head, 
well placed on expansive shoulders, and 
the look of mingled sagacity, energy, and 
good-humor were never forgotten. Who- 
ever remembers him thinks first of his 
smile. 

In one place Lowell shows him at a lit- 
erary dinner : — 

" The mass Teutonic toned to Gallic grace, 
The eyes where sunshine runs before the lips, 
While Holmes's rockets curve their long ellipse, 
And burst in seeds of fire that burst again, 
To drop in scintillating rain." 

He shows us Emerson, — 

"the face half rustic, half divine, 
Self -poised, sagacious, streaked with humor fine," 

and he curiously notes — 

" — the wise nose's firm-built aquiline." 

The study of Hawthorne's rather melan- 
choly face is extremely subtle : — 

"November nature with a name of May." 

There is a brief sketch of Longfellow, 
one of Felton, and one of Arthur Hugh 



TRIBUTE TO AGASSIZ 8 1 

Clough, the English poet who lived for a 
year near Elmwood, and afterwards died at 
Florence. 

Some of the brooding thoughts touch the 
heart as the eyes follow the lines : — 

" ' Tis lips long cold that give the warmest kiss, 
' Tis the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears, 
We count our rosary by the beads we miss." 

Only a great mind could have conceived 
this many -branched poem; only a gener- 
ous heart could have so permeated it with 
love and sorrow; only a poet could have 
sustained its thought and feeling in such 
stately and impressive lines. Few of Low- 
elPs poems better show his native qualities, 
and the art of which he was master. 

The tribute is to be found in " Hearts- 
ease and Rue," the volume which was 
published while he was minister to Great 
Britain. 

Three noble odes were written at the 
time of the United States Centennial Cel- 
ebrations: one read at Concord, April 19, 
1875; one rea d at Cambridge, July 3, 1876, 
being mainly a tribute to Washington and 
the State of Virginia; the third for the 
Fourth of July, 1876. They have great lifts 



82 THE POET AND THE MAN 

of imagination and billows of passion, and, 
with "The Commemoration Ode," rank 
among the poet's best works. The Three 
Odes are dedicated to E. L. Godkin, editor 
of the Nation. 



AN UPWARD CAREER 83 



VIII. 

We saw Lowell as a youth, a writer of 
rather frivolous verse; then a lover indit- 
ing sonnets ; then a reformer with the ear- 
nestness and high purpose of a primitive 
Christian; then a satirist and a delineator 
of Yankee character, to serve a great cause ; 
then a patriot, devoted to the unity and 
glory of country; and then a philosophic 
poet reasoning upon the dealings of the 
Almighty with men, and meditating upon 
duty and destiny, — faith and the immor- 
tal life. His literary career was a steady 
upward movement. 

He had never held office, 1 not even that 
of justice of the peace, a very common and 
common-place honor in Massachusetts. At 
the age of fifty-eight he began public life at 
the top. The traditions of the government 
had favored the appointment of literary 
men to diplomatic and consular posts. The 

1 He was a member of the Republican Convention which 
nominated Hayes for President, and was also chosen presiden- 
tial elector, — an office which, by force of circumstances, has 
become purely honorary and without any serious duty. 



84 THE POET AND THE MAN 

names of Irving, Bancroft, Marsh, Haw- 
thorne, Motley, Bayard Taylor, and Bret 
Harte readily come to mind. President 
Hayes, at the suggestion, it is said, of 
Howells, the novelist, offered to Lowell 
the Austrian mission, which he declined. 
Motley had found life in Vienna uninter- 
esting. Whatever Lowell's reason for de- 
clining may have been, he subsequently 
accepted the appointment to Spain, pos- 
sibly because he was then engaged in the 
study of Cervantes and the Spanish drama. 
In due time, upon the retirement of Min- 
ister Welch, he was transferred from Madrid 
to London. He was then sixty years old. 
His youth, with its enthusiasm, its hopes 
and deceptions, was far behind. His fame 
rose full-orbed upon Great Britain, and 
he had a reception seldom given to a 
stranger. He was again made welcome 
by men eminent in letters and in social 
rank, and was especially honored by the 
Queen. The islands seemed brighter for 
his coming, and fresh ties of sympathy and 
respect seemed to unite the elder and the 
younger peoples. How he bore himself in 
this place, the place of the highest dignity 
in the gift of the President, is fresh in the 
minds of all. He was a lover of his country, 



LIFE IN ENGLAND 85 

jealous of its honor, a patriot in every fibre ; 
while at the same time he was a citizen of 
the world of letters, and loved history in 
minsters and castles, and was conservative 
of the poetry of tradition. No one was 
more firmly based in the common language, 
or better read in the common literature, of 
our race. Englishmen knew he was the 
unchanged author of " Jonathan to John ; " 
and if he retained his popularity, as he un- 
doubtedly did, it was not by cringing, or 
surrender of democratic ideas, or suppres- 
sion of unpalatable truth. /It is in the 
blood of our race to admire a~inanly man. 

His numerous addresses throughout the 
kingdom gave evidence of his mature 
thought, scholarship, and grand style : they 
testify to the honor and respect in which he 
was held. A selection from these was 
published, entitled, " Democracy and Other 
Addresses." 

With the coming in of President Cleve- 
land in 1885, Lowell knew that by a rule 
in the Department of State he would be 
superseded. He had had enough of public 
life, and did not desire to remain in office ; 
and he welcomed his successor Mr. Phelps 
with cordiality. He told the writer that he 
recognized the ability and training of that 



86 THE POET AND THE MAN 

gentleman as quite superior to his own; 
that his (Lowell's) legal acquirements were 
slight and becoming obsolete, and, more- 
over, had never included constitutional or 
international law; while Mr. Phelps was an 
eminent jurist, versed in history and able to 
take up any question in diplomacy with 
mastery. Upon this topic he spoke with 
earnestness and at some length. He said 
he had been treated with proper considera- 
tion, and had nothing but good-will and 
high regard for President Cleveland. At 
a dinner in Boston after his return he spoke 
in a similar strain of the President, to the 
disgust of those who think it treason to 
party to admit any excellence in an oppo- 
nent. But Lowell was never a thick-and- 
thin politician, and still less a political 
trimmer. He had independent views on 
national questions, and, in regard to men, 
his just and unprejudiced mind recognized 
good qualities by whomsoever manifested. 
In 1888 was published a collection of 
poems entitled "Heartsease and Rue." 
They were mostly productions of later 
years, but one of them was "Fitz Adam's 
Story," written long before as the first of a 
series of Chaucerian tales, never to be com- 
pleted. 



RETURN TO ELMWOOD 87 

For some years he spent his summers 
in London and his winters in Boston, or 
with his daughter, Mrs. Edward Burnett, in 
Southboro, Mass. When her two sons were 
about to enter Harvard College the family 
removed to Elmwood, and the poet went 
to live with them. He had long shrunk 
from returning there, as the house was "full 
of ghosts, " he said. There had died his 
mother and father, his sister Rebecca, his 
first wife, and three or four infants. From 
the upper windows westward there is a 
lookout over the cemetery of Mount Auburn, 
where these loved ones rest. There at 
length he was settled, planning another 
visit to London for the following summer, 
— a visit never to be made. 

He had an inherited tendency to gout, 
and suffered at times severely. Even as 
far back as 1857 there were times when the 
pain seized the soles of his feet so sharply 
that he would lift them spasmodically high 
in air, with half-suppressed groans that 
were heartaching to hear. Still, his health 
was ordinarily good, and his body, though 
never robust, seemed equal to the demands 
of a life that was generally kept within 
simple limits. It was seldom that any ill- 
ness sent him to his bed. In 1885, when 



88 THE POET AND THE MAN 

he was leaving office in London, he seemed 
to have visibly aged; his shoulders were 
getting bowed, his face was thinner, his fore- 
head more deeply lined and corrugated, and 
his hair and beard growing gray. Still, 
as he had always been active, temperate, 
and extremely careful of his health, his 
friends looked forward to see him reach 
fourscore. It was impossible to think of 
the creator of Hosea Biglow as growing 
old. But in the latter part of 1890 dis- 
quieting reports came from Elmwood: 
disease had attacked a vital organ, and the 
worst was feared. Time passed without 
real amendment, and in August, 1891, after 
long and terrible suffering, he found relief 
in death. 

By his desire the funeral services were 
performed at the College Chapel by clergy- 
men of the Episcopal Church. The two 
surviving members of the whist-club then 
living in Cambridge were among the pall- 
bearers. His death produced a deep im- 
pression, and the newspapers were full of 
tributes from writers of every class. Those 
who best knew him mourned his loss with 
a sorrow that was to end only with life. 



PATRIOTIC POETRY 89 



IX. 

The time has not come for an impartial 
estimate of Lowell's works ; — not for those 
who lived within the sphere of his influence ; 
still less for those who felt the undving 
affection which his manly and generous 
qualities inspired. In some respects his 
works appeal more strongly to his country- 
men than to sympathetic readers in Great 
Britain. For a Briton cannot enter into 
his passionate devotion to the American 
Union, nor become enraptured over his 
prophecies of this country's future glory. 
Patriotic poems are for home-consumption, 
as are the brutally frank petitions to God 
in national hymns, such as: — 

" Confound their politics, 
Frustrate their knavish tricks, 
On us Thy blessing fix," etc. 

But there were other patriotic features in 
Lowell's poetry. Setting aside foreign 
" larks and daisies," and all conventional- 
ity, he set himself to sing of the birds and 



90 THE POET AND THE MAN 

flowers he knew, the landscapes and the 
men he had seen, the speech he had heard, 
and the unborrowed feelings of his own 
soul. His verse, therefore, excepting that 
of his earliest years, is no echo of English 
poetry, although he was master of its man- 
ifold vocabulary. In respect to his truth to 
nature, he is the most American of poets, 
unless it may be Whittier ; and his faith- 
fulness is a stumbling-block to English 
readers. How is a Briton to conceive of 
the multitude of bright objects peculiar 
to the New World which are sketched in 
Lowell's verse? The difficulties in rustic 
speech and manners are well nigh insur- 
mountable : however popular the " Biglow 
Papers" may be in Great Britain, not 
one reader there in a thousand really com- 
prehends the talk of Hosea, or the rustic 
charm of "The Courtm'," any more than 
he comprehends the poems of Burns. 

In the United States, though the comedy 
and satire of Lowell were immediately 
recognized, his serious poems were appre- 
ciated by few until long after they were 
published. Setting aside the inveterate 
party prejudice which cast a cloud over all 
he wrote, there was something in his verse 
which left common readers in bewilderment 



QUALITIES IN HIS POETRY 91 

or indifference. It was a new combination 
of elements, and it was distasteful to all 
whose souls had not been " touched to finer 
issues." No complete analysis can be 
given, but we may observe these : — 

First, Truth towards God, his fellow- 
men, the world of nature, and himself. 
Second, Idealism, including eternity of be- 
ing, the immanence of God in the soul, 
the supremacy of right, and the aspiration 
to a spiritual existence, including a spirit- 
ual conception of this present, life. Third, 
Brotherhood, in the sense taught by Christ, 
and ignored in most Christian pulpits. 
Fourth, Beauty, for its own sake, but 
always arm in arm with Strength, both 
ministering to mortal and immortal needs. 
Fifth, Melody, when compatible with other 
indispensable qualities. 

It was an unattractive combination to the 
American readers of poetry forty years ago. 

Men professedly seek for originality, 
and at the same time demand finish and 
grace ; not perceiving that grace and origi- 
nality are almost always at variance, and 
tend to exclude each other. Grace is 
the thing accepted, accustomed, expected; 
originality is startling, reactionary, and 
gives us pause. 



92 THE POET AND THE MAN 

A poet with such a genius for vera- 
city could never be conventional : he must 
write from fresh feelings and impressions. 
He could not be led by fashions in art, 
or philosophy, or politics. He could not 
pass by the poor and the outcast at his own 
door, — it was easy to pass by the leprous 
beggar of eighteen hundred years ago. He 
cared little for poetry which was not up- 
lifting to the soul, or useful to humanity. 

So we see that his ideal notions of right, 
truth, brotherhood, and spiritual life are 
the animating soul of the greater number 
of his serious poems. Reference has been 
made to the splendor and power of "The 
Present Crisis," and others of that early 
period. It is interesting, also, to notice how 
he has employed the old legends to incul- 
cate charity, tolerance, and Christian love. 
Listen to the blessed resolution of the 
discord in the final harmony of Godmin- 
ster chimes ! Look at the beautiful para- 
ble of the cups of differing size in the 
symbolic dream of Ambrose! Admire the 
secret of integrity and fortitude carried in 
Dara's great soul, and in his empty camp- 
chest! Think of the persistence of con- 
science in the pathetic story of Rhoecus! 
As for Sir Launfal, it is picture, legend, 



HIS MASTERS 93 

and Christian parable in one. Such poems 
need no added " application ; " they are 
themselves their own moral. Even in a 
personal poem, like "The Dandelion," 
there is something in the boyish memories 
to remind us that — 

" Heaven lies about us in our infancy." 

It is interesting to look at resemblances, 
so as to speculate upon the influences that 
may have affected a poet's style. Every 
artist begins by imitation, and happy is he 
who emerges betimes from control, and 
establishes his own individuality. At the 
beginning there were some suggestions of 
Tennyson's early manner, — a certain dain- 
tiness, and the use of obsolescent words. 
This did not remain, for the nature of 
Lowell was virile and robust. We can see 
that he was one with Chaucer in his joy in 
nature, and in the intuitive perception of 
character. He is moved by the frank flow 
of Dryden's lusty song; by the quaintness 
of Donne, and the directness and energy of 
Marvell, in the green shade of whose mysti- 
cal Garden both Emerson and Lowell might 
have lingered. 

" Beaver Brook" may perhaps furnish an 
illustration of Lowell's poetical method, — 



94 THE POET AND THE MAN 

if a sure instinct ever makes use of a method, 
— and show the shining qualities and the 
infelicities of his verse. Let us suppose 
that an ordinary man, a Philistine, — if 
readers prefer that name, — had walked by 
that little brook on a summer afternoon, 
at a time before the mill had become a 
ruin. He saw, as he passed, a sunlit valley 
lying below a hill on whose slope fell the 
shadow of a cedar. In the open door of 
the mill stood a whitened miller; but, as all 
millers are floury, this one called for no 
special remark. The great wheel was 
turning under a slender stream of water 
coming from a reservoir formed by dam- 
ming the brook. He did not see Undine, 
or Kuhleborn, or any of their tribe, tripping 
over the wheel : he saw only the splashing 
water, and heard only the din of the whirl- 
ing mill-stones; and with a listless glance 
he passed on. Now, keeping in mind the 
literal description that would be given by 
the man without a poet's vision, let us see 
what the poem shows us : — 

BEAVER BROOK. 

Hushed with broad sunlight lies the hill, 
And, minuting the long day's loss, 

The cedar's shadow, slow and still, 
Creeps o'er its dial of gray moss. 



BEAVER BROOK 95 

Warm noon brims full the valley's cup, 

The aspen's leaves are scarce astir; 
Only the little mill sends up 

Its busy, never-ceasing burr. 

Climbing the loose-piled wall that hems 
The road along the mill-pond's brink, 

From 'neath the arching barberry stems 
My footstep scares the shy chewink. 

Beneath a bony buttonwood 

The mill's red door lets forth the din; 

The whitened miller, dust-imbued, 
Flits past the square of dark within. 

No mountain torrent's strength is here; 

Sweet Beaver, child of forest still, 
Heaps its small pitcher to the ear, 

And gently waits the miller's will. 

Swift slips Undine along the race 

Unheard, and then with flashing bound 

Floods the dull wheel with light and grace, 
And, laughing, hunts the loath drudge round. 

The miller dreams not at what cost 

The quivering mill-stones hum and whirl, 

Xor how for every turn are tost 
Armfuls of diamond and of pearl. 

But summer cleared my happier eyes 

With drops of some celestial juice, 
To see how Beauty underlies 

Forevermore each form of use. 



96 THE POET AND THE MAN 

And more; methought I saw that flood, 
Which now so dull and darkling steals, 

Thick, here and there, with human blood, 
To turn the world's laborious wheels. 

No more than doth the miller there, 

Shut in our several cells, do we 
Know with what waste of beauty rare 

Moves every day's machinery. 

Surely the wiser time shall come, 

When this fine overplus of might, 
No longer sullen, slow, and dumb, 

Shall leap to music and to light. 

In that new childhood of the Earth 
Life of itself shall dance and play, 

Fresh blood in Time's shrunk veins make mirth, 
And labor meet delight half-way. 

The landscape is a picture of harmonious 
details. The brook is spiritualized, and 
sets machinery going in the brain as well 
as in the mill. While we are thinking of 
the crystal gleam of the falling water, we 
are suddenly appalled at the blood which 
" turns the world's laborious wheels. " And, 
as we come to the inspiring hope of the 
" wiser time," we are about to say that that 
poem fulfils all high conditions, when sud- 
denly we are forced to stop. We stop, be- 
cause we remember the melodists. What 



DISSONANT CONSONANTS 97 

will they say of " Swift slips Undine " — or 
of " child of forest still" ? What will they 
say of this line, — 

" And, laughing, hunts the loath drudge round " ? 

See how the consonants stand out like 
tense muscles on a gymnast's arm! Or, 
look at this row of jolting monosyllables : — 

" Fresh blood in Time's shrunk veins make mirth." 

Harsh words they are, with gutturals and 
sibilants crowding each other, and not to 
be levelled and glossed into a satin surface. 

Versifiers who make faultless lines to be 
crooned in mystical tones will be disgusted. 
And they have a right to a little sympathy, 
— a very little. It is to be admitted 
that the poems we have considered, "The 
Cathedral/' "The Footpath," and "Beaver 
Brook," are not as easy reading as "We 
are Seven ; " furthermore, that if Lowell 
had a nice sense of melody, it was subor- 
dinated to thought and energy. Not only 
his genius was not lyrical, — in the sense of 
excelling in sing-able verse, — but among 
shorter poems there are few gems of pre- 
destined crystallization, and never any of 
the verses written for sonorous effect, like 



98 THE POET AND THE MAN • 

Coleridge's "In Xanada did Kubla Khan/' 
etc. However, the poet in whose verse 
there is never anything to forgive seldom 
shows us anything to admire. If the soul 
of poetry is energy, its garment beauty, 
its effect emotion; if, according to Lan- 
dor, "philosophy should run through poetry 
as veins do through the body ; " if that is 
a poem which is inspired with original 
thought, graced by unborrowed pictures 
and figures, and which suggests continually 
more than meets the eye, then it will be 
impossible to deny Lowell a high rank 
among poets. 

He is, indisputably, a poet, but, as al- 
ready stated, more of a philosopher than a 
singer. 1 And he is a poet of nature, with 
this addition, that when he sees a land- 
scape he paints it, and, at the same time, 

1 As a notable example of the thought behind the thing, — 
just as the Egyptian priests, thousands of years ago, adored the 
Sun-God that was behind the sun,— the reader can look at Em- 
erson's " Musketaquit." We have space only for a stanza : — 

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, 
Repeats the music of the rain : 
But sweeter rivers, pulsing, flit 
Through thee, than thou through Concord plain." 
And the transcendental poet, B. W. Ball, in his poem to the 
Merrimack River, says, — 

" Thy sunny ripples, what are they 
If not reflections bright in me ? " 



THE NEXT GENERATION DECIDES 99 

looks through it, and perceives its true sig- 
nificance and its ideal relations. In this 
way the mind is led from the visible image 
to the thought behind it. 

Poems with such a range, such vivid 
conceptions, such high purpose, such keen 
insight, such tender sympathy, and such 
flashing lights of imagery, have never been 
very common ; and are not numerous enough 
now, on either side of the Atlantic, to en- 
danger Lowell's reputation. After more 
than forty years of beneficent influence, 
attended by a constantly deepening inter- 
est, his poems may be left to take their 
chnace with posterity. 



IOO THE POET AND THE MAN 



X. 



A disciple of Lavater once said to the 
writer, " There was never a great poet who 
had not a long and generally a shapely 
nose. Think of Wordsworth's profile, — 
Tennyson's, Dante's. I know the nose on 
Shakespeare's bust appears short, but I 
distrust it; the pictures are better." The 
writer thought to pose the physiognomist 
by naming Keats ; but he demurred, saying 
that the position of the head in the common 
engraving of Keats foreshortened the nose. 

The writer then suggested that the rule 
scarcely held in the case of Lowell. " That 
is true," said he, "and it confirms my 
theory. Lowell is a poet, but is not all 
poet. If in one way he has great ideality, 
comparison, and whatever other qualities 
belong to a poet, he has also a marvellous 
common-sense, like Ben Franklin, or Soc- 
rates. His face shows this as clearly as 
his writing and conversation. Never was 
a man more solidly planted on the basis of 
the understanding. When it comes to 
reasoning he is acute, vigorous, aggressive: 



CHARACTER IN PHYSIOGNOMY 10 1 

no man has a surer or swifter parry or 
thrust; only he tires of it at times, and, 
giving way to his love of frolic, puts a twist 
into a syllogism, which leaves his adversary 
little to do but laugh." 

It is not necessary to accept this reading 
of Lowell's physiognomy; for, though many 
men and all children are instinctive readers 
of facial expression, it is probable there are 
no exact and invariable correspondences be- 
tween the forms of features and the quali- 
ties of mind. But in respect to Lowell's 
twofold mental character there is some 
truth in the prognostication. Even those 
who knew him best were sometimes amazed 
at the invincible logic in which his thought 
took instant form ; and there was never a 
man quicker to hit the joint in the armor 
of an adversary. The solidity of his un- 
derstanding, joined to his inborn skill in 
statement and argument, was the foundation 
of his power as a writer of prose. In aid 
of this native ability came the resources of 
learning, and of wisdom, which is learn- 
ing's mellow fruit; and his wide and varied 
reading supplied him with illustrations 
from every age and country. His ideality 
and plastic faculty gave to the train of 
weighty thought the graces of image and 



102 THE POET AND THE MAN 

simile; and at length the sonorous sen- 
tences seemed moving to the sound of 
music, like a well-ordered army, glittering 
in sunlight. 

Or, in another mood, the sentences be- 
came playful or ironic, and the listener or 
reader followed their course as one follows 
an electric car by its fitful sparkles. 

It is not necessary to dwell upon the 
" Conversations on the Old Poets " (pub- 
lished in 1845), as he suffered that book to 
lapse. It contains many forcible and pun- 
gent passages, and shows originality and 
courage, but it lacks the mature richness, 
variety, and completeness of later works. 

"Fireside Travels" is one of the most 
characteristic and charming of his vol- 
umes. Its leading Essay, " Cambridge 
Thirty Years Ago," contains reminiscences 
of the old town, the old times, and the old 
people, and especially of certain rare old 
college professors. No paper of Lowell's 
surpasses it in its youthful freshness, its 
quaint humor and picturesque memories. 
Other essays — "A Moosehead Journal," 
"In the Mediterranean," "Italy," etc.— 
are full of delightful touches, neither to be 
imitated nor described. 



BRILLIANT PROSE ESSAYS I03 

"In My Study Windows" there are 
glances without and within — studies of 
nature and of books. "My Garden Ac- 
quaintance " is a study of the birds, 
whose coverts were in the thick under- 
growth that surrounded the grounds of 
Elmwood. "A Good Word for Winter" 
tells its own story. The paper on Lin- 
coln was written before his tragic end, and 
before the united voices of our people had 
given him the place where he stands, among 
the greatest, if not the greatest, of Ameri- 
can presidents. To read that article now 
is like reading prophecy, and its moral 
courage is refreshing and uplifting. 

Probably the most brilliant of his lighter 
essays is that "On a Certain Condescen- 
sion in Foreigners." The sentences gleam 
with wit, as from the play of polished 
swords. All forms of satire, irony, raillery, 
and sarcasm, are seen in it, but always in 
a quiet, bantering strain, and never with 
angry purpose. The delicate ridicule of 
the patronizing critics of our literature, in- 
stitutions, and manners, is delicious. The 
airy grace of this sustained pleasantry is 
without parallel. Almost any other man 
capable of such a satire would have been 
sure to write it in a way to provoke a not 



104 THE POET AND THE MAN 

unreasonable indignation on the part of 
those who were hit. 

Another remarkable essay is " Democ- 
racy," in which epigrams seem to be the 
staple of the composition. With an easy 
flow like Montaigne's, there are occasional 
deep thoughts like Bacon's, and multitudes 
of felicitous turns that remind us of Swift 
and Sydney Smith. This is not to com- 
pare him to any of those great men; only 
to indicate certain obvious resemblances. 
But it would be difficult to find another es- 
say combining such mature wisdom with 
such pungent and unexpected phrases, and 
animated with such inexhaustible spirit. 

Among historical compositions, that en- 
titled "New England Two Centuries Ago," 
and the address upon the Two Hundred 
and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding 
of Harvard College, are conspicuous. Un- 
der the poet's hand the life of the dead 
past is restored in its sombre beauty, its 
heroic devotion. The literary essays nat- 
urally are more numerous, and from them 
we gain a notion of the variety and extent 
of the reading on which they are founded. 

The choice of subjects, if adequately 
treated, is often an indication of the power 
of an author. If Lowell had chosen to 



WEIGHTY SUBJECTS CHOSEN I05 

compete with the light and graceful writers, 
he might have given us specimens of ad- 
mirable trifling; such as "Life at the 
Court of King Rene," "The Mystery 
of the Pentameron," "The Academia della 
Crusca," "Legends of the Rhine," and 
what not. But his innate good sense and 
the consciousness of power led him to 
choose the weightiest subjects, near to the 
hearts of mankind, — nothing less than a 
new survey of the chief landmarks of our 
literature. The list of authors treated 
includes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, 
Milton, Dryden, Fielding, Gray, Words- 
worth, Coleridge, and Keats ; and incident- 
ally many others are referred to. He 
wrote also upon Dante, Lessing, and Rous- 
seau; and if he had lived longer he would 
doubtless have given to the world his 
studies of Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and 
Goethe. So many critical estimates of the 
great English poets had been printed, one 
would think he would have found only dry 
straw to thresh; but in every instance he 
not only found something interesting to 
say, but either added to our knowledge or 
gave new points of view in regard to char- 
acter and poetic art. 1 

1 His essays upon the old English dramatists are appearing 
as this volume goes to press. 



106 THE POET AND THE MAN 

In estimating a character or a poem 
Lowell seldom used the destructive ana- 
lytic method. He did not seek to affili- 
ate a poet's philosophy, — as to Hegel or 
Spinoza, — nor to discover what propor- 
tion of this or that quality is found in his 
verse : metaphysical abstractions were not 
in his method. When one of the new critics 
has done with his "subject," it is not a 
man that the reader sees, but ticketed par- 
cels and stoppered jars of primal elements, 
like the results of a chemical analysis. This 
method is often ingenious, and calls for 
admiration from those who do not know 
how a constructive critic works. 

In reading Lowell's essay on Chaucer, 
that poet is re-created for us, touch by 
touch. We see him visibly rising in his 
proper person, with his native expression, 
and amid the surroundings of his time and 
place. It is like a sculptor's masterpiece, 
but in a finer element than clay ; and as we 
look we may see the miracle of Pygmalion 
wrought anew. Even the creative soul is 
revealed to us in its own atmosphere. 

Lowell had an intense sympathy with 
Chaucer. Both felt an abounding joy in 
nature; and Lowell could at least admire 
the master's genius in creating types of hu- 



CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE. MILTON 107 

man character. For this and other valid 
reasons his essay is the most satisfactory, 
as it is the most brilliant, of any ever 
written upon that great poet. With great 
propriety it is dedicated to Professor Child, 
the poet's near friend, and one of the most 
eminent scholars in English. 

In the article upon Shakespeare there is 
less absolute mastery, but it must be con- 
sidered among the few memorable attempts 
to illustrate the poet's art, and to give him 
a solid footing among men. A complete 
view of the world of Shakespeare's crea- 
tions would require a score of essays, but 
whoever knows this one well will have an 
impression as lasting as life. 

In regard to the essay on Milton, friends 
of Professor Masson, his biographer and 
editor, thought some of Lowell's strictures 
rude and his phrases brutal. Lowell was 
combative, and in this instance perhaps 
discourteous. He was exasperated with 
the inordinate length and discursiveness of 
Masson 's Life, and had no patience with 
his treatment of the subject; and the en- 
ergy of Lowell's temperament got the bet- 
ter of his usually calm judgment. Some 
of the harsh phrases must be regretted; 
although those who remember the ameni- 



108 THE POET AND THE MAN 

ties that used to prevail among British 
reviewers will find that there have been 
plenty of precedents. At the same time, 
this essay will be long remembered for its 
general breadth of view, and for certain 
groups of majestic and sonorous sentences, 
— among the stateliest in modern English. 

The article on Lessing is a model for 
a biographical sketch. It is full enough, 
but not burdened with dates or platitudes, 
and it contains an admirable view of Ger- 
man literature, and of Lessing's place in 
it. In the introduction there is some de- 
lightful banter upon the structure and crab- 
like movement of German sentences, and 
upon the mole-like predilections of certain 
German critics. There is nothing finer in 
the repertory of an ''American humorist." 
On the whole, the essay is (to borrow a 
favorite collocation from our friends the 
booksellers) both "entertaining and in- 
structive," and is the best account of a 
German litterateur obtainable in English. 

The essay on Wordsworth was variously 
estimated in Great Britain. The special 
disciples of the poet, who, like their mas- 
ter, thought every line of his inspired, were 
shocked at the proposal to throw over 
about two-fifths as dull rubbish. But 



ELEMENTS OF THE BEST PROSE I09 

Lowell celebrated the master's best verse 
in elaborate and picturesque sentences 
which are prose only in form ; and whether 
readers agree or not to the "weeding out," 
all will admit that the praise of the re- 
mainder is worthy and noble. In the vol- 
ume of Wordsworth's poems " chosen and 
edited by Matthew Arnold," it appears that 
Lowell's views are practically confirmed. 

There is not space, even if it were de- 
sirable, to refer to all the essays ; nor yet 
to the literary addresses which Lowell 
delivered on special occasions in Great 
Britain. In regard to the latter, every 
man who wields a pen, and who knows 
how much thought, judgment, scholarship, 
taste, and art go to the formation of clear, 
well-reasoned, allusive, and musical prose, 
recognizes the supremacy shown in them 
all. Exceptions maybe taken to his judg- 
ments, but not to the literary art. Each 
specimen is like a piece of work from Ben- 
venuto Cellini, perfect in design, perfect 
in the last detail. 

It may be difficult to satisfy all minds in 
expressing an opinion upon Lowell's rank 
as a writer of prose. But there are minds 
so constituted as to become easily annoyed 
with sallies, however brilliant, when pur- 



HO THE POET AND THE MAN 

m 

suing a serious subject. And there are 
those who object to allusions, mythologic, 
historic, or romantic, when they appear to 
be used, as some women use jewellery, to 
set off something that was well enough be- 
fore. And they will say that if a writer is 
to make a display of his powers, there can 
hardly be too much sparkle, within the 
limits of good taste, nor too many allu- 
sions, if apposite; but that if he feels a 
sense of duty in regard to his subject and 
his readers, he may hesitate about running 
down every metaphor which occurs to him, 
and bringing in recondite allusions which 
all but the very learned will have to leave 
unguessed. But there is no difficulty in 
recognizing .Lowell's keen perception, the 
grasp of principles, the array of facts, pre- 
cedents, and analogies, and the almost 
unparalleled power of witty and poetic 
illustration. Surely only a very unusual 
gravity would object to this. 

We have before referred to the peculiar 
dualism of Lowell's mind: a strong cur- 
rent of reason running parallel with a crea- 
tive imagination; and a serious purpose 
harmoniously co-existent with frolic, hu- 
mor, and comic suggestion. We might think 
one of his inkstands filled by the spirit of 



IDEAL ENGLISH III 

Fun, while the other was under the care 
of the sedatest of the Muses. 

If we look at certain grave, sweet pages 
of Thackeray, Newman, Martineau, Mat- 
thew Arnold, and the Ruskin of thirty 
years ago, we feel that we have in them 
specimens of ideal English. Something 
of the calm dignity, the seemingly artless 
perfection, and the limpid movement, char- 
acteristic of those writers, may sometimes 
be seen in passages of Lowell ; but his fe- 
licity in figures, and the irrepressible rush 
of his double stream of thought, often lead 
him into a style of writing that is both 
poetry and prose, and is not purely either. 
Hence his readers will be divided. With 
the reflective and philosophic an undue 
exuberance either of ornament or mirth is 
out of place. But there are others who 
read for the brilliancy of poetic illustra- 
tion, and who believe that wisdom itself 
may be sportive without being taxed with 
folly; and to such the beauty and airy 
spirit of his sentences give an inexpressible 
delight. 

As for the allusions, it may be said that 
all famous essays contain mineralogicyfr/dfr, 
— from cairngorms to diamonds, — many 
of which will be beyond the appreciation 



112 THE POET AND THE MAN 

of the unlearned. It is only a question of 
more or less. However this may be de- 
cided, it must be admitted that the com- 
bination of qualities in the essays makes 
them a storehouse of knowledge and a 
quarry for quotation ; and endears them to 
men of ardent feeling and poetic insight, 
especially if they have had the advantages 
of general reading. Such men read with 
pure delight every sentence of Lowell, no 
matter upon what subject, — as they read 
every sentence of Thackeray. 

In his own way Lowell is a master, and 
he will have the suffrages of admirers until 
some change comes to overturn the meth- 
ods of our century; at the same time, with 
more simplicity and sobriety, or self-re- 
straint, his circle of readers would have 
been limitless. In that case he would not 
have been Lowell. , 



A MODERN CATO 113 



XI. 



In considering Lowell's character we are 
struck by a bluff and determined honesty 
which does not mince phrases for evil- 
doers, nor make compromises with injus- 
tice His epigram upon the copyright 
question, "The Ten Commandments Will 
Not Budge," was everywhere quoted. But 
certain poems upon plunderers and pecula- 
tors in New York and elsewhere were con- 
ceived in such a spirit of wrath, and were 
pervaded by such vitriolic phrases, that 
they scorched whomsoever they touched. 
The error was to take those special in- 
stances of official crime as characteristic of 
a state or a period. Obviously it would 
be unjust to stigmatize a whole people on 
account of the robberies of a gang of poli- 
ticians. The first rush of anger was nat- 
ural, but when, years afterward. Lowell 
was making a collection which should stand 
with posterity as part of his mature con- 
victions, he struck out " The World's Fair, " 
and probably other poems which were the 



114 THE POET AND THE MAN 

expressions of a temporary mood. Though 
the spirit which prompted them was noble 
and courageous, it would seem that he was 
right in cancelling them; they had served 
a temporary purpose, but they did not be- 
long with his well-reasoned and maturely 
considered poems. 

Although these poems are omitted from 
Lowell's " complete works, " and in defer- 
ence to his wishes are not reproduced in 
this volume, it may be that when a genera- 
tion has passed, and the history of this cen- 
tury is written, they may need less apology, 
and may even constitute a claim to the ad- 
miration of posterity. For it is evident 
that we are groping now in an eclipse of jus- 
tice. There is no check upon great crim- 
inals, no punishment for colossal crime. 
For theft to be honorable it needs only to 
be done on a grand scale ; the larceny of a 
jackknife leads to the house of correction, 
but stealing a railroad and ruining thou- 
sands of bond-and-stockholders is good 
financiering. Millionnaires, gorged with 
plunder, attend church. One might rea- 
sonably ask if, with pliant clergymen, the 
Ten Commandments do not budge ? Have 
the wreckers of railroad companies in New 
York, or of insurance companies in Hart- 



RELIGIOUS OPINIONS II5 

ford, ever been hit from the pulpits of the 
churches where they "worship"? 

We may ask in simple phrase what has 
become of the Ten Commandments and the 
Golden Rule, in business, politics, or in 
society at large ? What is the religion or 
morality of the numberless combinations 
to put up prices ? What law or what sen- 
timent of justice restrains the capitalists 
who are turning this country into an en- 
closed hunting-field wherein their fellow- 
men are the game? 

It was the growing pressure of this evil 
spirit which moved the soul of Lowell, 
and which will stir the souls of others 
in larger and larger circles, until there is 
a return to old-fashioned honesty, or a 
plunge into chaos. 

The subject of Lowell's religious opin- 
ions is not likely to be definitely settled. 
In his young manhood he used to mention 
with evident satisfaction that his father 
had never called himself a Unitarian ; that 
he was simply pastor of a Congregational 
Church, and a friend of Channing, — noth- 
ing more. In the course of an acquaint- 
ance of thirty years the present writer never 
heard him utter a word upon the doctrine 



Il6 THE POET AND THE MAN 

of the Trinity; it was only inferred from 
various circumstances that he sympathized 
with his father's views. In his poems it is 
seen how little stress he laid upon creed; 
they only inculcate brotherhood, piety, and 
love. There was never an irreligious tone 
in his conversation, but he seldom went to 
church until he reached middle age; and 
when he went it was generally with his wife 
to the Episcopal service. 

He was pained and almost angry at the 
lengths to which the more "advanced" lib- 
erals were going. He was vehemently 
opposed to modern materialistic doctrines ; 1 
and, as heretofore related, declared that 
for his part he would not "believe that 
Hamlet sprang from a clod.' 7 He loved 
the Bible, often referred to the Book of 
Job, loved the beauty of a ritual, loved 
things established; and meanwhile his be- 
lief did not appear to be really fixed upon 
any system. It is a long step from the 
simple ethics of the Sermon on the Mount 
to a metaphysical creed. 

The sense of justice which made him a 
reformer was an ever-present ideal, but 
appeared to have been evolved from the 

1 A glimpse of his thought and feeling is shown in Credidi- 
mus Jovem Regnare. 



BY INSTINCT A CONSERVATIVE 117 

intellectual side; while, by instinct and 
habit, he was (sentimentally) a conserva- 
tive in every fibre of his being. The reader 
will see a fine specimen of an almost par- 
adoxical analysis in the opening portion of 
" Fitz Adam's Story. " With a less clear in- 
tellect, and a less faithful conscience, he 
might have remained on the other side. 
For among reformers there were some who 
outran his convictions and were antipa- 
thetic in various ways. The name " crank, " 
had not then been invented. Some wished 
to destroy the church, because it had been 
"the bulwark of American Slavery." Low- 
ell did not wish to destroy an institution 
which had power for good, but rather to see 
it built up ; and, besides, a church with a 
long history behind it was to him beautiful 
and venerable for its own sake. He said 
more than once that if the Calvinistic 
churches were to be judged by the results 
of their teachings upon character and con- 
duct, as seen in Scotland and New Eng- 
land, those churches were entitled to the 
highest place. For, he said, the superiority 
was not solely in morality and intelligence, 
but in the prevalent sense of duty, in high 
ideals and inflexible principles, and, in 
short, in the consciousness of the spirit- 



Il8 THE POET AND THE MAN 

ual world that was an eternal now with be- 
lievers. After due allowance made for 
hypocrites and time-servers, he thought 
there were among Calvinists more godly 
men, each living — 

" As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye," 

than in any other branch of the Christian 
church. And one day he added, to the 
writer's infinite surprise, that, considered 
as a set of intellectual propositions, the 
"five points" appeared to form a theory 
about as reasonable as any other. He 
seemed to advance this tentatively, as he 
might have put forth a metaphysical spec- 
ulation, and not to intimate that he had a 
fixed belief in it. This was some fifteen 
years ago, and the thought may have been 
temporary. The Rev. Dr. Savage lately in 
a public discourse said that, in the course 
of a conversation two or three years ago, 
Lowell told him he presumed his general 
views upon religion were in the main those 
which he (Dr. Savage) held. This was 
for Lowell an unusual confidence. Pos- 
sibly the contending theories were from 
time to time alternately in light and in 
shadow. But the doctrines of his poems, 



FAVORITE AUTHORS 1 19 

reverence, love, and brotherhood, never suf- 
fered eclipse or change. 

It would be difficult to mention his 
favorite authors, for as time went by he 
was continually laboring in new fields. 
Among his early treasures were Froissart, 

— in a manner the Walter Scott of his age, 

— and Marco Polo, Purchas, and Hakluyt, 
authors who carried with them a largeness 
akin to nobility, and who, if they did 
not write poems, often suggested poetry. 
Milton's line, — 

"And airy tongues that syllable men's names," 

Lowell said, was from Marco Polo. Of 
the old dramatists he was most fond of 
Marlowe ; as for Chapman, he preferred his 
Homer to his plays. He admired the 
well-ordered sentences and beautful images 
of Jeremy Taylor; the style of Hooker, ear- 
liest of great prose-writers, and of Lat- 
imer and South. Undoubtedly he had read 
the works of Lord Bacon, but he never spoke 
of him. He had an unspeakable aversion 
to maxims like Rochefoucauld's, which 
include a kernel of selfishness or an innu- 
endo of baseness. 

He lived in the intellectual light of 



120 THE POET AND THE MAN 

Shakespeare. He often read passages of 
Chaucer to friends, and loved to point out 
the master-strokes which described a per- 
son and revealed his character. It may be 
stated here, somewhat out of place, that 
Lowell once hoped to write a New England 
poem after the manner of the " Canterbury 
Tales," sketching a group of people at a 
nooning in the field, but after " Fitz Adam's 
Story " he went no farther. The reason is 
not far to seek. The burdens he assumed 
in the university, his constant and severe 
studies, and his subsequent duties as min- 
ister, combined to lead him away from the 
fresh, joyous, creative mood in which such 
a composite and many-colored poem could 
have been fashioned. 

This reference to favorite books is ne- 
cessarily brief. The attentive reader of his 
essays, of "The Fable for Critics," and of 
special poems, like that in memory of Agas- 
siz, and those upon Longfellow, Holmes, 
Quincy and Wyman will learn more than 
can be told here. But it may be said he 
talked often about Emerson, and with spe- 
cial admiration about Hawthorne. He said 
to the writer he would not venture a com- 
parison between the latter and Shakespeare, 
but he believed the world would sooner see 



A STORY OF THACKERAY 121 

another Shakespeare than another Haw- 
thorne. 

Among English contemporaries he ad- 
mired Tennyson and Arthur Hugh Clough, 
made only brief and respectful references to 
Browning, and loved Thackeray. Back in 
the fifties Clough was for a year Lowell's 
near neighbor in Cambridge. 

It is singular that Thackeray had an im- 
perfect appreciation of Lowell's poetry. 
He said to the author of this volume (July, 
1857), "With such a genius for comedy, — 
greater, I believe, than any English poet 
ever had, — with such wit, drollery, Yankee 
sense and spirit, I wonder he does not see 
his 'best hold,' and stick to it. Why a 
man who can delight the world with such 
creations as Hosea Biglow should insist 
upon writing second-rate serious verse I 
cannot see. " And there was much more of 
the same sort. He evidently loved Lowell, 
for, in speaking of him a little later, a spray 
of tears bedimmed his large spectacles ; but 
he could not see any merit or "extenuating 
circumstances" in his serious verse. 

It was not for a young man of thirty to 
argue with the leading writer of Great 
Britain, but he stated his opinion modestly, 
and then changed the subject. For obvious 



122 THE POET AND THE MAN 

reasons this conversation was never fully 
reported during Lowell's lifetime. 

Do we yield to Thackeray's judgment, 
given so long ago ? By no means. Expe- 
rience has shown that authors are not in- 
fallible, unless in special lines, and that 
men without creative genius often have 
wider sympathies and sounder judgment. 
Emerson's " Parnassus" is profoundly in- 
teresting as showing the direction of his 
reading, his opinions, and tastes, but as a 
collection of English poetry it is one of 
the most incomplete and unsatisfactory 
ever made. Thackeray was a great man, 
and a greater artist, in a certain sphere, 
but he had never any perception or con- 
sciousness of an ideal world. His concep- 
tion of poetry may, perhaps, be not unfairly 
gauged by his gay and vivacious ballads. 
It is true, Lowell had not then written 
" The Cathedral " or " The Commemoration 
Ode." 

Complaints were made during Lowell's 
last years of his forbidding manners; and 
there were intimations that he was less 
American at heart than British ; but nothing 
is more certain than the persistence of his 
patriotic feeling and his courage to ex- 



COULD UTTER UNWELCOME TRUTHS 1 23 

press it under all circumstances. A nota- 
ble instance occurred at the dinner of the 
Society of Authors in London at which 
Lowell made one of his perfect speeches. 
He told the audience, in substance, that 
Great Britain had been in the wrong in both 
of the contests with the United States ; and 
that the last war (1812) though insignifi- 
cant, and not creditable to either party, in 
a military point of view, was just and ne- 
cessary ; and that by the abatement of Great 
Britain's pretensions to the sovereignty of 
the seas, and to the right of search, inter- 
national law had been advanced, and the 
whole world was the gainer. These were 
not his words, but what he said was said 
most impressively; and every hearer felt 
that there was a calm courage behind the 
utterance. Furthermore, he was always firm 
in regard to what he considered the justice 
due to Ireland, though of course he could 
take no part, while minister, in a British 
domestic question. 

As to manners, a man of seventy who 
has passed through vicissitudes is seldom 
effusive, and Lowell certainly was no ex- 
ception to the rule. People who expected 
that Hosea Biglow would be found sitting 
on a gate in Hyde Park, whittling and 



124 THE POET AND THE MAN 

telling stories, were hardly prepared to see 
a rather stately man in faultless dress, 
whose steady eyes repelled familiarity, and 
sometimes rebuked pretension. 

The origin of the ill-feeling towards 
Lowell was in the false idea that still pre- 
vails among our people as to the duties 
of a minister at London. The rich and 
fashionable who visit that capital think 
his chief duty is to present them at court ; 
and that the ceremony is an affair about 
which there should be no more difficulty 
than in visiting the Tower or the Zoologi- 
cal Garden. There are other supposed 
duties, such as writing letters of introduc- 
tion for ambitious people to a great poet, 
novelist, or other celebrity; also looking 
up in the Herald's College, or in remote 
parochial registers, genealogies, and evi- 
dence of descent from shadowy ancestors ; 
also recovering fortunes, — always on de- 
posit at the Bank of England, and crying 
out for their lawful owners — besides oc- 
casionally cashing or guaranteeing doubtful 
checks. The evil has become oppressive 
for ministers, and even for consuls, who 
could many a tale unfold. 

Now the British Government, with great 
courtesy, allows the American minister to 



PRESENTATIONS AT COURT 1 25 

present a reasonable number of his country 
men and women. But any one who knows 
how great is the crush of British people 
who have the best right to attend these 
functions, — the necessary presentation of 
civil and military officers, young and old, 
upon being commissioned or promoted; 
the presentation of the daughters of peers 
and gentlemen who must appear at court, 
and of the diplomatic body, including sec- 
retaries and attaches; — any one who knows 
the facts will see that the presence of for- 
eigners is a grace which is not to be abused. 
Very few can be presented without infrin- 
ging indubitable rights in which our people 
have no share. No such crowds are ever 
pushing to the English court from France, 
Germany, or other European country; but 
Americans, though often politically hostile, 
and sometimes discourteous, to British 
officials, seem to think they have only to 
ask, and the gates of St. James should fly 
open. Every American minister for the 
last thirty years has had his patience 
completely exhausted by the persistent de- 
sire of his country-women to wear their 
trains and diamonds in the presence of 
the Queen. The pressure was calmly and 
steadfastly resisted by Lowell, and with 



126 THE POET AND THE MAX 

the natural result. It is almost certain 
that many of the reports of Lowell's aris- 
tocratic and chilling manners came from 
disappointed aspirants. 

Few Americans, of real distinction have 
desired to be "presented." Many have 
lived in Great Britain for years without 
once thinking of it. A man may respect 
the Queen as a sovereign and as a woman, 
and yet not desire to embarrass his minis- 
ter or the lord chamberlain, nor to put on 
an obsolete and uncomfortable suit for the 
sake of passing with a bow before her 
majesty. 

As has been more than once said, Lowell 
wrote with extreme care, but none of his 
prose appeared in book form until after it 
had been kept, considered, and carefully 
gone over. He was inaccessible to offers 
of money for articles or poems ; and in the 
last years of his life enormous sums were 
named as ready for any contributions from 
his pen. But he wrote only when a subject 
came to him naturally, and when to write 
was a pleasure and a duty. Had he been 
avaricious, or even reasonably "thrifty," 
he could have earned a large income. As 
it was, he earned enough for his wants, 
and wrote enough for his fame. Some of 



NO WEALTH BUT A GREAT NAME 12J 

the possessors of great incomes from liter- 
ature find in the end that their wealth is 
their chief reward; Fame being chary of 
laurels, and seldom bestowing them on 
those who abuse her patience. 

Lowell left a small estate, but a good 
name, which is better than riches. His 
love for his alma mater was shown by his 
bequest of such books in his collection as 
the college library did not possess. He 
watched the growth of Harvard with the 
deepest interest and pride. 

His association with public, life, though 
flattering and honorable, was only an inci- 
dent in his career ; it was as a scholar, in- 
structor, essayist, and poet that he realized 
his early aspirations and fulfilled his 
destiny. 

He left his letters and MSS. in the care 
of his friend Norton, the faithful and ac- 
complished editor of Carlyle's correspon- 
dence. His letters must be full of inter- 
est, as a record of his life, as containing 
the seed-thoughts of his works, and as 
showing the play of his delightful humor. 

His career furnishes an impressive les- 
son for American youths. He made the 
most of his talents and opportunities. He 
loved books, studies, the beauty of the 



128 THE POET AND THE MAN 

outer world, his art, and his fellow men ; 
but chiefly he kept his eyes fixed on lofty 
ideals, and always listened to the voice of 
conscience. He measured duty by abso- 
lute standards, and compromised nothing 
of principle. With such a character, even 
without his phenomenal gifts and graces, 
he would have been A Great Man. 



A BIBLIOGRAPHY: 

FOR THE ASSISTANCE OF READERS 
AND STUDENTS. 

In the list following it is believed that each 
work is mentioned, with the date of its original 
publication. But there is no attempt to give all 
the various new editions, new combinations or 
arrangements of works which the publishers 
have placed before the public. 

Class Poem 1 1838 

A Year's Life and Other Poems . . 1841 
The Pioneer. A Magazine. Nos. I., 

II., and III 1843 

1 In the narration preceding it will be seen that Lowell was 
" in exile " at the time when the " Class Poem " was to be read. 
It is dated at "Concord, August, 1838." In the Preface the 
author says, " Many of my readers and all of my friends know 
that it was not by any desire of mine that this rather slim pro- 
duction is printed. Circumstances known to all my readers, 
and which I need not dilate on here, considerably cooled my 
i?iterest in tJie ^>erforma7ice.' , ' > The poem covers 45 pages of 
close type, and, considering the age of the writer (19), is a piece 
of strong and free versification. In its substance it is mainly a 
satire upon the abolitionists, and upon the progressives in reli- 
gion and politics. The suggestion is that the Indian is more 
deserving of sympathy than the African. The use of the phrase 
" clothes-philosophy " shows that Lowell had already read 
" Sartor Resartus." 

I29 



i % 30 a bibliography. 

Poems 1844 

Conversations on Some of the Old 
Poets 1845 

[Mainly upon Chaucer, the Old Dramatists, Chap- 
man, Ford, with incidental references to Pope 
and others.] 

A Fable for the Critics (Anon.) . 1848 

The Vision of Sir Launfal . . . 1848 

The Biglow Papers 1848 

Notable Political Articles in the 

N. Y. Anti-Slavery Standard . . 1848 

Poems (Two volumes) 1848 

Life and Works of Keats .... 1854 
Poems of Maria White Lowell. Ed- 
ited by J. R. L. (Privately printed) . 1854 
Mason and Slidell. A Yankee Idyl. 

(Reprinted from the Atlantic) . . . 1862 
II Pesceballo. A Nonsense-Opera from 
the Libretto in Italian of Prof. Child. 

About 1862 

Fireside Travels 1864 

[Containing : Cambridge Thirty Years ago ; A 
Moosehead Journal ; At Sea ; In the Mediter- 
ranean ; Italy ; Roman Mosaics.] 

New England Two Centuries ago. 
A Review of Palfrey. (Reprinted from 
the N. A. Review) 1S65 

Commemoration Ode (Sons of Har- 
vard). (Privately printed) .... 1865 

The Biglow Papers (Second series) . 1867 



A BIBLIOGRAPHY. I3I 

A Look Before and After. (Reprinted 
from the IV. A. Review) 1867 

Witchcraft. A Review of C. W. Up- 
ham. (Reprinted from the N. A. Re- 
view) 1868 

Under the Willows 1868 

Among My Books 1870 

[Containing : Dryden ; Witchcraft ; Shakespeare 
once more ; New England Two Centuries Ago ; 
Lessing and Rousseau.] 

The Cathedral 1870 

My Study Windows 1871 

[Containing : My Garden Acquaintance ; A Good 
Word for Winter ; On a Certain Condescension 
in Foreigners ; A Great Public Character ; 
President Quincy ; Carlyle ; Abraham Lin- 
coln; J. G. Percival; Thoreau ; Swinburne's 
Tragedies; Chaucer; Library of Old Authors; 
Emerson the Lecturer ; Pope.] 

The Courtin'. (Illustrated) .... 1874 
Dante. A ReYiew of Maria F. Rossetti's 

44 Shadow of Dante" 1876 

Among My Books (Second series) . . 

[Containing: Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Mil- 
ton, and Keats.] 

Three Memorial Poems 1879 

[Containing: The Ode read at Concord, April 19, 
1875 ; The Ode read under the Washington 
Elm, Cambridge, July 3, 1875 ; and The Ode 
for July 4, 1876.] 

Address upon President Garfield. 

(London) 1881 



i32 a bibliography. 

Address at the Dedication of the 

Library in Chelsea, Mass . . . 1885 
Democracy, and Other Addresses . 1886 

[Containing : Democracy ; Dean Stanley ; Field- 
ing ; Coleridge ; Books and Libraries ; Words- 
worth ; Don Quixote ; and Harvard's 250th An- 
niversary.] 

Political Essays 1888 

[Containing : The American Tract Society ; The 
Election in November ; E Pluribus Unum ; 
The Pickens-and-Stealins Rebellion ; General 
McClellan's Report; The Rebellion, Its 
Causes and Consequences ; McClellan or Lin- 
coln ? Reconstruction ; Scotch the Snake or 
kill It ? The President on the Stump ; The 
Seward- Johnson Reaction ; The Place of the 
Independent in Politics.] 

Heartsease and Rue 1888 

The Independent in Politics. Ad- 
dress before the N.Y. Reform Club . 1888 
A Fable for Critics. With portraits 

of authors , . . . 1890 

Literary and Political Addresses . 1891 

[Contents the same as in " Democracy," with 
three additions; viz., Tariff Reform, The In- 
dependent in Politics, and Our Literature.] 

Complete Works in Ten Volumes . 1891 
Latest Literary Essays and Ad- 
dresses. Edited by Professor Norton. 1891 

[Containing : Gray ; Landor ; Walton ; Milton's 
Areopagitica ; Richard III.; Modern Lan- 
guages; Progress of the World.] 



A BIBLIOGRAPHY. I33 

The Old English Dramatists. Ed- 
ited by Professor Norton 1892 

[Containing : Marlowe, Webster, Chapman, Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, Massinger and Ford; with 
an Introduction.] 

The Twelve Lectures on English Poets and Poetry deliv- 
ered in 1854-55 were fully reported in the Boston Daily 
A dvertiser, but have not been collected. 



AFTER-THOUGHTS 



The first after-thought of an author becomes 
a preface, and serves as an inclined plane to get 
the reader up to the subject. Later, when the 
pages are stereotyped, other belated thoughts 
may arise, chiefly regrets for omissions, and for 
the want of qualifications of general statements ; 
and these may be an inclined plane to let the 
reader down. 

After-thoughts are inevitable when, as in the 
present instance, an unusual brevity has been 
aimed at. With greater fulness a more truthful 
impression would be given to those who only 
partially know the circumstances. 

It should be borne in mind that though this 
is intended to be a reasonably complete view of 
Lowell's life (in miniature), yet the intimate, 
personal part of the narrative belongs mainly to 
the period between 1853 and 1859. After i860 
the circle of his friends expanded, and was in- 
tersected by other and larger circles, until — 
after the overthrow of slavery — it would have 
been difficult to find a literary or a fashionable 
'35 



I36 AFTER-THOUGHTS 

man in Boston who would admit that he had not 
always admired Lowell, and always opposed 
slavery. 

In regard to Lowell's early friends, mention 
has been made chiefly of neighbors ; there were 
many in Boston and elsewhere to whom he was 
warmly attached. One of these was Charles W. 
Storey, a vivacious, witty, and delightful man, 
whom Lowell always called his solicitor. An- 
other was Edmund Quincy, a man of rare ability 
and courtly manners, — a picked man of coun- 
tries. As he and Lowell had been co-workers 
in the anti-slavery cause they were united by 
close ties. The rare gatherings of Quincy *s 
friends at Bankside were memorable. 

It may be mentioned that Lowell would 

not, or could not, look upon the face of a dead 
friend. The writer went with him to Quincy's 
funeral, and he declined to enter the room where 
the coffin was. He said he could not; that his 
repugnance, dread, or malaise^ was not to be 
overcome. 

A further qualification must be made more 
prominent, in regard to literary friends. There 
was never a time in which his relations with Pro- 
fessor Child, George William Curtis, the Nor- 
tons of Shady Hill, and some others, were not 
V intimate, tender, and trustful. So with his 
numerous relatives in the region. This is to be 
taken in connection with the gatherings on 
Sunday afternoons; and the Friday whist club. 



AFTER-THOUGHTS 1 37 

Who was Robert Carter, so frequently 

mentioned? 

We shall all have to be " explained 1 ' some 
day. He was a man of enormous reading, 
Prescott's secretary ; afterward an able political 
journalist ; and finally advocatus diaboli, or final 
corrector, in the office of Appleton's Cyclopaedia. 
He lived first near " The Willows, 1 ' afterwards 
in Sparks Street, then an unknown region. 

" For Sparks Street is a dark street, 
And succory grows in Sparks Street, — 
And lamp-posts everywhere ! " 

So ran the ballad, doubtless Lowell's. Carter 
was short, plump, and very near-sighted ; full of 
spirits, though quiet in manner, and with a mem- 
ory that was never at fault. Lowell, who had 
names for most of his friends, called him " Don 
Roberto," or " The Don." 

Notice in the rhymed preface to the " Fable 
for Critics : — 

" I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from 
the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence 
of John." The "Doctor" was his brother-in- 
law, Howe; and "John," of course, was John 
Holmes, whose unfailing humor was much like 
that of Charles Lamb. 

Carter's only book was " A Summer Cruise on 
the Coast of New England." It ran through 
many editions Mrs. Carter wrote some delight- 



138 



AFTER-THOUGHTS 



ful children's books, among them " The Great 
Rosy Diamond," which after forty years still 
retains its popularity. 

The little house in Sparks Street long ago 
gave place to modern villas, but it remains in 
memory as one of the alternate stations of the 
whist club. 

Mr. Bartlett says that Lowell, some 

months before his death, sat down with him, 
John Holmes, and another (unnamed) fourth 
hand ; and they all strove to bring back the 
light and warmth of long ago. In the old times 
Lowell always proposed the toast of " The Club " 
with great emphasis ; and on this occasion, — the 
last on earth, as it proved to be, — he gave the 
old toast with evident emotion, as .,hown by a 
break in his voice and a quivering of the eyelids. 
It was about that time when the striking but 
rather pathetic photograph of Lowell was taken 
by Pach. 



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